Edinburgh Textbooks on The English Language - Advanced
Series Editor: Heinz Giegerich
Books in this series provide readers with a detailed description and explanation of key areas of english Language study. The authors presuppose a basic working knowledge of the topic and explore aspects of the linguistics of english for an intermediate or advanced student readership.
'Gibbons and Whiteley present an elegant and usable guide to current stylistics in all its disciplinary richness. They demonstrate the appeal of the field with brilliantly creative analyses of a wide range of literature. Any literary criticism of any literary text will be richer with this book to hand.'
Peter Stockwell, University of Nottingham
How do texts create meaning? how do we arrive at our textual interpretations? Why do we become 'lost in a book' or feel deep emotion in response to a literary character? Through close attention to the way texts are written and the language they use, as well as what we know about the human mind, Contemporary Stylistics: Language, Cognition, Interpretation provides readers with the tools to begin answering these questions. In doing so, it introduces the theoretical principles and practical frameworks of stylistics and cognitive poetics, supplying the practical skills to analyse your own responses to literary texts. including innovative activities for students and with case studies of work by writers like Dylan Thomas, E. l. James and Kazuo Ishiguro, this is a detailed analysis of contemporary stylistics that offers both historical contextualisation of the discipline and points towards its possible future direction.
Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University.
Sara Whiteley is Senior Lecturer in Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield.
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Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (Routledge 2012) and editor of Mark Z. Danielewski (Manchester University Press 2011), the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge 2012), Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (Rowman & Littlefield International 2017) and Pronouns in Literature: Perspectives and Positions in Language (Palgrave 2018).

Sara Whiteley is Senior Lecturer in Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is a cognitive stylistician with a particular interest in the way readers experience contemporary literature. She is co-author of The Discourse of Reading Groups: Integrating Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives (Routledge, 2016) and co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Part I. Introducing Contemporary Stylistics

1. Contemporary Stylistics



Part II. Literature as Language

2. Foregrounding


3. Phonemes to Sound Patterning


4. Morphemes to Words


5. Phrase to Sentence


6. Register, Lexical Semantics, and Cohesion



Part III. Literature as Discourse

7. Dialogue and Spoken Discourse


8. Speech, Thought, and Narration


9. Modality and Point of View


10. Transitivity and Ideology


11. Varieties and Invented Languages



Part IV. Text as Cognition

12. Figure and Ground


13. Cognitive Deixis


14. Schemas, Scripts, and Prototypes


15. Cognitive Grammar



Part V. Reading as Mental Spaces

16. Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Integration


17. Text-Worlds


18. Negation and Lacuna



Part VI. Reading as Experience

19. Analysing the Multimodal Text


20. Understanding Emotions



Part VII. Reading as Data

21. Corpus Stylistics


22. Investigating Readers



Part VIII. Conclusion

23. Future Stylistics

References

Literary Works

Poetry

Prose

Other Media

Critical Works

Corpus Programs

Index