Sara Whiteley – författare

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.Key Features:Introduces the key terms for each contemporary stylistic frameworkOutlines the foundations of the discipline and addresses cutting-edge developments such as reader response research, corpus methods, multimodality and reader emotion Contains practical analyses, innovative exercises for students, and further reading suggestions in each chapterAddresses the recent attention to multimodal and digital literature and research into empiricism and emotionEach topic is explored through original analyses of a wide range of texts, including poetry, prose, dialogue, song lyrics, political discourse, and linguistic transcripts

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.Key Features:Introduces the key terms for each contemporary stylistic frameworkOutlines the foundations of the discipline and addresses cutting-edge developments such as reader response research, corpus methods, multimodality and reader emotion Contains practical analyses, innovative exercises for students, and further reading suggestions in each chapterAddresses the recent attention to multimodal and digital literature and research into empiricism and emotionEach topic is explored through original analyses of a wide range of texts, including poetry, prose, dialogue, song lyrics, political discourse, and linguistic transcripts

Of interest in their own terms as a significant cultural practice, reading groups also provide a window on the everyday interpretation of literary texts. While reading is often considered a solitary process, reading groups constitute a form of social reading, where interpretations are produced and displayed in discourse. The Discourse of Reading Groups is a study of such joint conceptual activity, and how this is necessarily embedded in interpersonal activity and the production of reader identities. Uniquely in this context it draws on, and seeks to integrate, ideas from both cognitive and social linguistics.

The book will be of interest to scholars in literacy studies as well as cultural and literary studies, the history of reading, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, digital technologies and educational research.