I. A. Richards is an influential figure in literary criticism but has rarely been thought of as someone who laid the foundations for cognitive stylistics. This book proposes that Richards was a "protocognitivist."

West argues that Richards anticipated many of the discipline's core aims, methods and assumptions. The book argues that the roots of cognitive psychology lie in early 20th-century psychology, when there was a focus on cognitive processes such as memory and learning, attention, categorisation, perception and consciousness. It was this cognitive psychology that Richards drew...

In this important book, Lesley Jeffries introduces a phenomenon which has not been given the attention it deserves - the contextual construction of oppositional meaning. These are opposites not recognisable as such out of context but that are clearly set up this way in the text concerned.

The significance of oppositional meaning is well-known, and has been discussed by scholars for millennia, from Philosophy to Politics. But the main emphasis has always been on the conventional opposite: the opposite recognised by lexical semantics.

Starting from socio-cultural viewpoints,...

World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last forty years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory.

The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and...

Text World Theory is a powerful framework for discourse analysis that, thus far, has only been used in monolingual Anglophone stylistic analyses. This work adapts Text World Theory for the analysis of Spanish discourse, and in doing so suggests some improvements to the way in which it deals with discourse - in particular, with direct speech and conditional expressions. Furthermore, it applies Text World Theory in a novel way, searching not for style in language, but for the style of a language.

Focusing principally on deixis and modality, the author examines whether...

Crime narratives form a large and central part of the modern cultural landscape. This book explores the cognitive stylistic processing of prose and audiovisual fictional crime 'texts'. It also examines instances where such narratives find themselves, through popular demand, 'migrating' - meaning that they cross languages, media formats and/or cultures.

In doing so, Crime Fiction Migration proposes a move from a monomodal to a multimodal approach to the study of crime fiction. Examining original crime fiction works alongside their translations, adaptations and remakings proves...

Focusing on the first journal in 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath', this book writes a convincing case for the value of corpus-based stylistics and narrative psychology in the analysis of representations of the experience of affective states.

Situated at the intersection between language study, psychology and healthcare, this study of the personal writing of a poet and novelist showcases a cutting-edge combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, including metaphor analysis, corpus methods, and second person narration. Techniques that systematically account for...