Stylistics has become a familiar subject over the recent past, and this has inevitably resulted in a spate of books on the subject. They fall into two broad categories: one devoted to background material and the other to an of one or more texts. The first category itself consists of two kinds of book: one in which the reader is assumed to have no knowledge of linguistics and the other in which some knowledge of linguistics is presupposed. It may be appropriate to consider first these various categories and their implicalions for those who want to get into stylistics. I shall start by considering those background books which assume no linguistic knowledge on the part of the reader, of which The Language of Literature by M. Cummings and R. Simmons is a good example[l|. Because they assume the absence of any linguistic knowledge, such books must spend most of their time in providing it, for it is also a presupposition of such books that a familiarity with linguistics is a prerequisite for the stylistic study of literary texts. As the authors write in their preface Since the means given to the student to describe literary language is the technique of linguistic description, this introduction to literature is also an introduction to the basic tools and basic concerns oflinguistic analysis (p. xv). The implication of this is that one cannot direct a reader to a grammar of the language to acquire the tools himself; he has to be provided with the tools in the same book in which he is shown how they can be used for a particular purpose. It is hardly surprising that a reader of such a book might well feel that more attention is given to the basic grammatical tools Ihan to their application. The book by Cummings and Simmons deals in turn with phonology and phonetics, graphology, grammar, lexis and context in much the same way as any standard grammar of the language would. The question ofwhetherall this information is necessary for a stylistic of literary texts is not asked; equally it is not considered whether a methodological organisation which is suitable for grammar is appropriate for stylistics. It is possible that many readers of this book who have no previous knowledge of linguistics will feel that they are being taught linguistics rather than stylistics, and consequently they may not get past the chapters on phonology and phonetics because they will fail to appreciate the relevance of this chapters to their own concerns. The detail which is provided is excessive and potentially self-defeating, and it provides the reader with no idea as to how he should start a stylistic analysis.