Stylistic analyses of Philip Larkin's Ambulances and Harold Pinter's Victoria Station

Stylistics can be defined as analysing literary texts by employing some linguistic tools. Thus, there is a powerful relationship between stylistics and literary criticism and combining them while doing literary analysis helps literary critics to be more aware of the process of the interpretating literary texts. In this context, this study sets out to examine two significant works in 20th-century English literature within the framework of concepts and theories introduced in the studies of stylistics. The study first analyses Ambulances (1961) by Philip Larkin, a prominent author in post-war England and a nationally favourite poet. While doing so, it focuses on Larkin’s repeating themes and subjects, involving pessimism, death, and fatalism. Then, the present study examines Harold Pinter's Victoria Station (1982). An English playwright and eminent British dramatist who has won many awards, Pinter has written a lot of plays and dramatic sketches. In his plays, one can mostly see complex ambiguities, elegiac mysteries, and comic uncertainties. Therefore, this study is centred on Pinter's authorial and textual styles in Victoria Station by often referring to his explicitly political critiques. In both cases, the study employs Mick Short's stylistics toolkit, a methodology provided as an online course at Lancaster University (2005).