Postcolonial Stylistics is intended for scholars working in World Englishes, postcolonial studies, stylistics and literature generally. Written by Esterino Adami, who has devoted himself to the study of World Englishes, such as contemporary Indian English (see Adami Reference Adami2022), this book is a contribution to the ‘interactive relation’ of the two disciplines of stylistics and postcolonial studies (p. 5). Justifying language, identity, belonging, history and ecology as the keywords of postcolonial texts, the author organizes the book around these five aspects. By analyzing these themes in a selection of literary texts from a broad range of English‑speaking postcolonial contexts, he reveals ‘the language used and elaborated by postcolonial writers’ (p. 40). The book is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the integration of stylistics and postcolonial studies; Chapter 2 introduces the key concepts of the two disciplines; Chapters 3–7 discuss English as World English, followed by an exploration of the stylistic features of identity, belonging, history, and ecology in postcolonial texts, with each chapter offering stylistic analyses of multiple texts; and Chapter 8 concludes by summarizing the book’s contributions and noting that, beyond literary genres, postcolonial stylistics can be applied to ‘other expressive modes such as films, TV series, and videogames’ (p. 217). The book is approximately 220 pages, with historical and literary postcolonial timelines appended, offering readers a reference to the historical context and representative works.

Unlike traditional stylistics, which is based on a linguistic framework, this book reflects the interdisciplinary trend of stylistics. One advantage of not being based on one linguistic framework is that postcolonial texts are highly hybrid in language and culture, so stylistic paradigms based on one linguistic school may be inadequate. This may explain why the author insists on the ‘eclectic’ method advocated by Leech and Short (Reference Leech and Short2007, originally published in 1981) in both his theoretical exposition and case analyses. This approach involves a comprehensive analysis of stylistic choices at phonetic/graphological, lexical, syntactic, and textual levels, drawing on the list of stylistic features proposed by Leech and Short, while also integrating insights from cognitive stylistics, pragmatic stylistics, feminist stylistics, narratology, and Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia.

Compared with stylistic studies of a specific genre, such as Montoro’s (Reference Montoro2012) stylistic study of ‘cappuccino novels’, Dutta–Flanders’s (Reference Dutta–Flanders2017) stylistic analysis of ‘suspense’ in crime novels, and Stockwell’s (Reference Stockwell2000) stylistic analysis of science fiction, the reviewed book is indeed more ‘ambitious’ (p. 18) in using stylistic methods to reveal the English characteristics and connotations in the broad field of postcolonial texts. As far as the study of postcolonial English is concerned, the reviewed research is not the first one. For example, Schneider (Reference Schneider2007) put forward the theory of postcolonial English from the perspective of historical language variation. However, on the basis of a few related studies such as Talib (Reference Talib2002) and Tunca (Reference Tunca2014), the author made an extensive analysis of postcolonial texts covering a variety of genres with the help of stylistic methods, which not only demonstrated the rich manifestations of postcolonial English in texts, but also revealed the key role of these stylistic features in the construction of textual meanings and values, thus deepening the study of postcolonial English.

However, as the author acknowledges at the beginning, while the use of five postcolonial keywords offers a reasonable framework, the appropriateness of this approach requires further reflection. One problem that emerges from this approach is that, with the exception of the chapter on ‘Language,’ the other four themes – identity, belonging, history and ecology – have many common stylistic features. For instance, language hybridization and cognitive metaphor can simultaneously reveal identity, express belonging, reconstruct historical narrative and serve as means of ecological writing. Similarly, homo‑/heterodiegetic narrators exist in all narratives and only become foregrounded stylistic features when they deviate qualitatively or quantitatively. Consequently, if each chapter were to comprehensively analyze all stylistic devices, repetition would be inevitable and depth would be compromised. A more ideal approach might be to present common stylistic features of postcolonial texts in Chapter 3, and then, in Chapters 4–7, focus on the stylistic devices most relevant to each theme. In fact, each chapter offers noteworthy explorations in this regard. For example, in Chapter 4 on ‘Identity’, the author analyzes several representative texts. One case reveals the marginal identity of a Zimbabwean immigrant to the UK through the insertion of the Zulu word umgodoyi, which is italicized, and through the frequent use of non‑standard English features at the syntactic level, thereby constructing the linguistic style as Pidgin or ‘broken English’ (p. 87; the term is problematic for suggesting that some English varieties are merely ‘broken’ versions of standard English). In another case, several stylistic features together construct the fluidity and complexity of the Sudanese immigrant’s diasporic identity. However, only single examples of hypotaxis and parataxis are provided. Further examples of their recurrence and explicit discussions on how they contribute to identity construction would have added depth and breadth to the analysis. This suggests that, while the stylistic features are clearly identified, their integration with thematic concerns remains to be further developed.

This observation points to a broader challenge in the book: the author’s effort to be comprehensive in each chapter necessarily limits the space available for exploring how these stylistic features distinctly shape each of the five thematic concerns. The analysis thus lays a valuable foundation, while also inviting readers to pursue more fully the connections between stylistic choices and the postcolonial keywords around which the book is organized. For example, the analysis of Finding Rosa in Chapter 5 covers metaphors, deixis, and modalities, but for the latter two features, their prominence and textual functions are not fully demonstrated, making the analysis resemble a listing of potentially meaningful features rather than a focused exploration of those most relevant to the theme of belonging. In Chapter 7, the author analyzes the density of sibilant and fricative sounds and typesetting that does not extend to the margins in The Bush by the Trinidadian poet Victor D. Questel (p. 193). But the analysis does not explain the relevance of this phonological feature to postcolonial themes. If non‑extension of typesetting is a rejection of colonial regularity, is the phonological feature related to the sound pattern of the native language? The analysis stops short of establishing a clear link between stylistic features and thematic interpretation. In To Drink its Water by South African poet Ingrid De Kok, the analysis points out that the formal characteristics of alliteration and enjambment help to build images, but it fails to clarify what images are constructed. Does alliteration strengthen the auditory texture of ecological decline? Does enjambment simulate the flow of water or the rupture of a home? The key step between formal analysis and thematic interpretation is still lacking. Mark G. Sanchez’s Jonathan Gallardo is analyzed for its various stylistic features, revealing the interweaving of colonial history and ecology in Gibraltar English. However, classifying the character’s loneliness and hesitation as ‘mind style’ does not reveal his unique cognitive framework as a postcolonial English speaker (p. 204). The book also analyzes the postcolonial subversion of the cognitive metaphor constructed by colonists, yet the cognitive processes in readers and their thematic significance are not fully discussed.

In spite of these limitations, this study presents various English varieties from postcolonial contexts. These include pidgins (sometimes pejoratively labeled ‘broken English’), such as Nigerian Pidgin English, which exhibits features including absence of auxiliary verbs, lack of grammatical agreement, omission of articles, and non‑standard use of possessive adjectives and subject pronouns. The study also examines creoles, such as Caribbean creoles, and acrolectal varieties along the post‑creole continuum, with Jamaican English as a case in point. It also discusses the Llanito vernacular of Gibraltar, a Spanish‑based variety shaped by intensive contact with English. Moreover, it demonstrates code‑switching between English and former colonial languages such as Swahili, as well as code‑mixing or glossing through the insertion of indigenous lexical items into English sentences, exemplified by the Zulu term umgodoyi, Arabic kafir, Igbo word ogaranya, Persian pir and Indian terms such as Pathar Maar, khichri‑kuhri, kashti and maidikri. In addition to providing detailed textual analysis of the features mentioned above, the author mentions Ken Saro–Wiwa’s invention of ‘Rotten English,’ which is grammatically based on Nigerian Pidgin English and incorporates non‑standard English features, Standard English, and vocabulary and cultural imagery freely drawn from his native language, Ogoni (p. 182). Additionally, the book explores postcolonial migrant diasporic English writing, such as Italian‑Canadian migrant English and Japanese‑Canadian post‑war contact English, revealing the extensive linguistic hybridity in postcolonial contexts. At the level of writing and typesetting strategies, these hybridized elements are foregrounded through eye dialect (such as ‘yuh’ instead of ‘you’), italics, and capitalization. Postcolonial texts also employ non‑standard phonetic presentations, such as the ‘semi‑phonetic respelling’ of local accents (p. 210) or the direct identification of characters’ accents (e.g., ‘Igbo accent,’ p. 58), alongside non‑standard grammatical features. These diverse formal strategies collectively reveal postcolonial writers’ challenge not merely to standard English, but to the colonial order it represents.

Thus, the book has made significant contributions to the geographical scope of postcolonial English studies – its coverage spans Africa (West Africa/Nigeria, East Africa/Kenya, Southern Africa/South Africa), the Caribbean (Trinidad), Europe (Gibraltar), South Asia (India) and North America (Canadian migrant writing and post‑war Japanese contact English), encompassing various English varieties and diasporic writing, as well as dynamic contact practices such as code‑switching, code‑mixing and glossing – all arising from contexts of colonial encounter. Overall, the book makes a pioneering contribution to presenting the panorama of postcolonial Englishes and validating the explanatory power of stylistics for it.