Understanding language and its capacity to create literary effects is vital for any student of English. Stylistics, the linguistic study of literary texts, has a key role to play in literary criticism. This book covers the theory and practice of teaching stylistics, focusing on the value of objectivity, rigour and replicability in text analysis.

We tend to think that politicians, copywriters and journalists can affect us by their use of language, but how does this happen, exactly? Critical Discourse Analysis provides us with general theories for explaining the impact texts can have, considering the social and political contexts in which texts are produced and read. Stylistics provides detailed tools of analysis for understanding how texts work. Critical Stylistics combines the strengths of these two approaches to uncover the deep-seated ideologies of everyday texts.

This book introduces a new way of looking at how poems mean, drawing on the framework first developed in the author's book Critical Stylistics, but applied here to aesthetic more than ideological meaning. The aim is to empower readers of poetry to articulate the features of poetic language that they come across and explain to themselves and others why these features convey the meanings that they do. While this volume focuses on contemporary poets writing in English and mostly based in the UK and Ireland, the framework will work just as well for other eras' poetry, as well as for other...