Book excerpt: First published in 1992, Political Stylistics draws together ideas about society and language from a range of theorists including Pratt, Bourdieu, Goody and Watt, and Bakhtin, to establish a political stylistics: a way of studying the formal properties of texts based on the principle that all linguistic production operates within the intricate network of power relations that structure the social realm. On a practical level, this methodology is used to analyse the representation of popular French and argot in three literary works where it extends beyond the speech of the characters and enters the narrative. The book is articulated along three axes: the trajectory of the French working class from mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century; the trajectory of popular language from social margin to literary centre; and the evolution of the novel from naturalism to modernism, to post-modernism. This book will be of interest to students of literature, linguistics, literary theory, and cultural studies.