Critical Stylistics has been mainly used on political and media texts. Its capacity to expose power relations and ideological positioning in contemporary poetry has been little explored, particularly in cross-cultural comparative frameworks. This research fills this void by analyzing how works from Anglo-American and Arab literary traditions use poetic language to encode and critique dominant ideologies. The present research seeks to answer three questions:(1) How do Rosanna Warren and Ali Jaffar Al Allaq employ stylistic devices to create subjectivity and position ideologies in the context of their respective socio-political spaces? What language do poets use to create and engage with power and institutional violence? The textual-conceptual functions in Jeffries’s (2010) model reveal the poets’ similarities and differences in their critiques of modern warfare. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how Critical Stylistics can systematically uncover the linguistic manifestation of ideology and power in political poetry and how textual choices construct different ideologies. The poets assert their subjectivity and their engagement with socio-political realities through the analysis of these poetic works. The research applies the Critical Stylistics framework by Lesley Jeffries (2010) to the analysis of two poems: Rosanna Warren’s Fire (from Ghost in a Red Hat) and Ali Jaffar Al-Allaq’s Ink of Solitude (Ḥibr al-Waḥshah) (from Lord of the Two Solitudes). The study demonstrates that stylistic choice is inherently ideological, and Critical Stylistics provides a rigorous empirical framework for exposing how poetry functions as a counter-hegemonic discourse. Both poets transform poetic form into a tool of resistance, accountability, and cultural preservation, though their critical perspectives differ fundamentally based on their cultural and geopolitical positions.
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Abdullah et al. (2026) studied this question.
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