Taking inspiration from Deborah Schiffrin’s Approaches to Discourse, the analysis of lists in this article proposes a criterion for distinguishing descriptions from lists by claiming that the more list-like descriptions are, the more clearly they have an opening and closing categorial frame. A second thesis concerns the comparative difference in function between literary and non-literary lists, though fictional discourse may include argumentative lists and embed inventories and list-related factual genres. Illustrations are taken from the nineteenth-century novel, especially Dickens. It is also claimed that Dickens’s lists arguably mark a shift from more pedestrian descriptive enumeration to stylistic exuberance and anticipate postmodernist experiments in the self-reflexive and ludic utilization of lists.
Descriptive Lists and List Descriptions
