Paul Simpson is a Lecturer in the School of English at Queen’s University, Belfast. His previous publications include Language, Ideology and Point of View (1993).

'A book that has long been needed, collecting together relatively recent linguistic ideas with the most useful of the older work and presenting them accessibly, without the assumption that the reader either has a sophisticated command of grammatical terms or that tutors will necessarily want to subscribe to either a formal or a functional approach to language study. There is no doubt that this book will be a major contribution to the pool of textbooks upon which stylistics teaching can draw.' - Judy Delin, The Linguist

• Preface 1 Introduction: studying language and literature 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Why stylistics? 1.3 Register and ‘literary language’ 1.4 Using this book Suggestions for further reading 2 From shapes to words: exploring graphology and morphology in poetry 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The system of graphology 2.3 Morphemes and words 2.4.1 Using linguistic models for stylistic analysis 2.4.2 Extending the analysis: a workshop 2.5 Summary Suggestions for further reading 3 Words and meanings: an introduction to lexical semantics 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Words and meanings 3.3 Words and combinations 3.4 Techniques for stylistic analysis 3.5 Summary Suggestions for further reading 4 Exploring narrative style: patterns of cohesion in a short story 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Practical activity: reconstructing a short story 4.3 Results and discussion 4.4 Extending the analysis 4.5 Practical activity: creative writing 4.6 Summary Suggestions for further reading 5 Dialogue and drama: an introduction to discourse analysis 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Dialogue and discourse 5.3 Models for the analysis of discourse 5.4 Discourse analysis and drama dialogue 5.5 Summary Suggestions for further reading Afterword.