The Anxiety of Prestige in Stephen King’s Stylistics

This paper introduces a term, the anxiety of prestige, to examine thematic or stylistic textual commentaries by generally considered “popular” fiction authors on issues of literary prestige, with Stephen King as a case study. While, thematically, an anxiety of prestige has been obvious in many of King’s works for decades, we suggest a novel approach: unearthing latent evidence of an anxiety of prestige in King’s stylistics, through corpus query of specific stylistic features suggested by King’s own writing advice book, namely adverbs, the passive voice, and “Swifties”. Through close and distant reading, we interpret these stylistic features as evidence of King’s textual responses to perceptions of “low” and “high” literature, and suggest that the anxiety of prestige can be investigated in larger popular fiction corpora in future work.