Marina Lambrou is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of East London, UK. Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK.

'This is a lively selection of contributions, on a wide range of texts (fiction, plays, and poetry) and drawing on a remarkable diversity of theoretical commitments, from twenty of the most talented newer or younger academics engaged in language-oriented analyses of literature.  Each essay in turn is usefully introduced by an established academic in the same field. This format, in which an older author sponsors a newer one while being given the chance to point out differences of view, lends both a gracious formality and a spirit of collegial dialogism to the collection. For anyone who wants to see what issues and arguments fascinate and inspire some of the exciting new generation of stylisticians, this is an excellent place to look.'

• Introduction: the state of contemporary stylistics; 1 Computational stylistics; 2 Hyperfiction and possible worlds; 3 Free indirect discourse; 4 Metaphor /cognitive linguistics; 5 Corpus Stylistics; 6 Text worlds in contemporary fiction; 7 Crime fiction mindstyle; 8 Cognition and rhetoric; 9 Pragmatics and stylistics; 10 Space and poetic landscape; 11 Oral narrative analysis; 12 Lyrical poems and perception; 13 Deixis and point of view; 14 The stylistics of popular fiction; 15 Feminist narratology; 16 Fictional minds; 17 Drama and stylistics; 18 Consciousness in narrative fiction; 19 Poetics of children's fiction; 20 Stylistics and language teaching.