A corpus stylistic approach to Casino Royale

This paper is part on an ongoing project that takes a corpus linguistic approach to investigating the stylistic
characteristics of popular fiction. Here we present a corpus stylistic analysis of Ian Fleming’s novel Casino
Royale, focussing on such issues as the construction of character and the stylistic characteristics of the
novel as a whole. In so doing we also discuss the methodological value of a corpus approach to stylistic
analysis, and its potential for providing an objective way in to the analysis of long texts. We use
WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004) and Wmatrix (Rayson 2005) to look at word frequencies, keywords, key
semantic domains, clusters, concordances and semantic prosodies, and we look at the extent to which the
results we obtain tie in with literary critical comment on the James Bond novels. Although this paper
40 focuses on one novel in particular, we also aim to discuss general theoretical issues concerning corpus
stylistics. We argue that local categories of description are crucial to capture textual features in literary
texts, and also contribute to the systematic apparatus that corpus linguistics suggests is necessary to
describe language. In this respect, we aim to provide support for Sinclair’s (2004: 51) assertion that ‘no
systematic apparatus can claim to describe language if it does not embrace the literature also’.