This paper is an introduction to current work in the use of language corpora in the study of literature, and an exploration of the potential for further work.

Stylistics and corpus linguistics have much in common. Both are empirical approaches which study the real evidence of language usage. There are however there is a lack of good-quality electronic texts and software tools for their analysis.

However, there is important work in this field. Two main approaches are described. The first involves the the rigourous and exhaustive analysis of a particular feature in a corpus of texts through the process of annotation. The second involves finding norms of language use in a reference corpus and thus identifying deviations from the norms in a literary text.