Professor Joanna Gavins is Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield, where she teaches courses in cognitive linguistics, stylistics, and ecolinguistics. She is the author of Poetry in the Mind: The Cognition of Contemporary Poetic Style (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Reading the Absurd (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Text World Theory: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

• List of Figures; Acknowledgements; 1 The Literary Absurd, THE ABSURD IN PHILOSOPHY, THE ABSURD IN LITERARY CRITICISMA NEW APPROACH, READERS OF THE ABSURD; 2IDENTIFYING THE ABSURD, CATEGORIES AND CATEGORISATION,CONTEXT, COMMUNITY AND SITUATED CONCEPTS, A CLINE OF EXPERIMENTALISM, WRITING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ABSURD,READING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ABSURD, BUILDING ABSURD WORLDS, EXPERIMENTING WITH ABSURD WORLDS,HUMOUR AND THE ABSURD, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; 3 ABSURD MINDS, A SINGULARLY MASCULINE PHENOMENON?, CHARACTER-BUILDING, READING OTHER PEOPLE’S MINDS, VERSIONS OF UNRELIABILITY, ESTRANGING MINDS, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; 4 ABSURD FICTIONS, ABSURD WORLD-BUILDING REVISITED, ABSURD LANDSCAPES AND EMOTIONAL RESONANCE, TIME, SPACE, AND FICTIONALITY, MIXING GENRES, MIXING MODES, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; 5 ABSURD VERSES, THE STYLISTICS OF ABSURD PROSE FICTION, READING THE ABSURD IN PROSE FICTION,READING THE ABSURD IN POETRY, STYLISTIC FAMILY RESEMBLANCES ACROSS POETIC TEXTS,TOWARDS A STYLISTICS OF ABSURD POETRY, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; REFERENCES

The absurd is arguably one of the most significant literary genres of the second half of the 20th century and as a genre it has received plenty of scholarly attention from literary scholars. Over the years, the features of absurd drama have received some attention from stylisticians, but Gavins’s monograph constitutes the first comprehensive stylistic study of absurd narrative prose. She employs a variety of stylistic models to analyse this genre… I was impressed to see how Gavins uses the framework in tandem with so many other stylistic models, cognitive and traditional.