Hisory of stylistics

Stylistics can trace its roots to the formalist tradition that developed in
Russian literary criticism at the turn of the twentieth‐century, particularly in
the work of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Its most famous member and the
most well‐known exponent of Russian Formalism was Roman Jakobson
(1896‐1982) whose work focused on defining the qualities of what he
termed ‘poetic language’. According to Jakobson, the poetic function of
language is realised in those communicative acts where the focus is on the