Textual Matters: The Social Effectiveness of Style

Publication year
1988
Collection
Pages
126-141
Comment

style as the appearance and organization of linguistic forms in a text, and the effects produced in the relations of production and consumption of a text - are closely interrelated. Producers of texts have certain kinds of consumers of texts in mind, and have, consciously or not, particular aims for the texts that they produce. Conversely, the appearance and organization of linguistic features in a text has particular effects for readers, enabling or facilitating certain readings, closing off or attempting to close off others. [...]
My discussion of these questions is organized around (excerpts from) two texts: the first is part of an advertising brochure for medical practitioners [...]; the second is from a Mills & Boon novel, a doctor-nurse romance entitled A Candle in the Dark. (127)

Kress does not give more details about the text in question, and there are various novels with similar titles, but I suspect it must be A Candle In The Dark written by Grace Read and published in 1982.

I noticed that Kress discusses this novel again in Communication and Culture: An Introduction (ed. Gunther R. Kress, New South Wales University Press, 1988), in Chapter 4, "Language as Social Practice." However, I have not been able to find out enough about this item to know whether it should be given its own entry in the database or not.