Includes bibliographic references and index.

Part 1: Introducing contemporary stylistics -- 1.Contemporary stylistics -- Part 2: 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 3: 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 4: Text as cognition -- 13.Deixis and deictic shift -- 14.Schemas, scripts, and prototypes -- 15.Cognitive grammar and construal -- Part 5: Reading as mental spaces -- 16.Conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration -- 17.Text-worlds -- 18.Negation and lacuna -- Part 6: Reading as experience -- 19.Analyzing the multimodal text -- 20.Understanding emotions -- Part 7: Reading as data -- 21.Corpus stylistics -- 22.Investigating readers -- Part 8: Conclusion -- 23.Future stylistics.

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, Interpretation, Cognition 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, EL James and Kazuo Ishiguro, this is a detailed analysis of contemporary stylistics that offers both historical contextualization of the discipline and points towards its possible future direction.