The main aim of the MA Thesis is to explore what new insights corpus stylistics methods can provide to the first cyberpunk series, namely William Gibson’s Sprawl (1981-1988), encompassing the novels Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, as well as the short stories “Johnny Mnemonic”, “New Rose Hotel” and “Burning Chrome”. While there is an extensive body of literary criticism that discusses Gibson’s fiction, there is very little focus on Gibson’s use of language that makes his writing distinctively cyberpunk. That is why the study provides an innovative stylistic approach to Gibson’s cyberpunk that connects linguistic findings from a corpus-based methodology with the large body of existing literary criticism on cyberpunk.
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Brief presentation of the thesis |