ABSTRACT Literary style, the meeting point between literary criticism and linguistic analysis, is the focus of this paper. The study demonstrates the viability of collaboration between principles of the two approaches. Focusing on two novels of the world-acclaimed African novelist, Chinua Achebe, the paper suggests that even when a writer's stylistic inclinations are recognizable, each literary work is at the same time a product of peculiar thematic, social and discursive situations, which are inevitably reflected in its stylistic features. It concentrates on such levels of linguistic analysis as lexis, semantics and graphology, while privileging allusion, setting and symbolism as elements of literary explication relevant to the comparative study of Achebe's style(s) in the novels.
