Broadly speaking, stylistics is the study of style in language. Its focus is the way in which language varies under the influence of factors such as context, purpose, author and period. Traditionally, however, stylistics has tended to privilege literary works. It is indeed quite common for stylistics to be defined as the linguistic study of literature. Following Leech (1985), this article distinguishes between literary stylistics and general stylistics. A noticeable feature of recent publications in stylistics is that they tend to include analyses of both literary and non-literary texts. Stylisticians are increasingly aware of the need to cross the boundary between literature and non-literature in order to deal adequately with phenomena such as speech presentation, narrative, point of view, and so on. The 21st century is likely to see further moves towards a greater integration of the literary concerns of stylistics within the broad area of discourse and communication studies.