Joanna Gavins is Reader in Literary Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Reading the Absurd (EUP, 2013) and Text World Theory: An Introduction (EUP, 2007).Ernestine Lahey is Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Stylistics at University College Roosevelt. She has published widely on subjects relating to (cognitive) stylistics, Text World Theory and Canadian literature and culture.

• Notes on Contributors1. World Building in Discourse, Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey 2. ‘I felt like I’d stepped out of a different reality’: Possible Worlds Theory, Metalepsis and Digital Fiction, Alice Bell 3. Author-Character Ethos in Dan Brown’s Langdon-Series Novels, Ernestine Lahey4. Building More-Than-Human Worlds: Umwelt Modelling in Animal Narratives, David Herman 5. Building Hollywood in Paddington: Text World Theory, Immersive Theatre, and Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man, Alison Gibbons6. Speaker Enactors in Oral Narrative, Isabelle van der Bom7. Text World Theory as Cognitive Grammatics: a Pedagogical Application in the Secondary Classroom, Marcello Giovanelli8. Worlds from Words: Theories of World-building as Creative Writing Toolbox, Jeremy Scott9. The Texture of Authorial Intention, Peter Stockwell10. Building Resonant Worlds: Experiencing the Text-Worlds of The Unconsoled, Sara Whiteley11. ‘This is not the end of the world’: Situating Metaphor in the Text-Worlds of the 2008 British Financial Crisis, Sam Browse12. The Humorous Worlds of Film Comedy, Agnes Marszalek13. Spanglish Dialogue in You and Me: An Absurd World and Senile Mind Style, Jane Lugea 14. Autofocus and Remote Text-World Building in the Earliest English Narrative Poetry, Antonina Harbus15. Into the Futures of their Makers: A Cognitive Poetic Analysis of Reversals, Accelerations and Shifts in Time in the Poems of Eavan Boland, Nigel McLoughlin 16. Stylistic Interanimation and Apophatic Poetics in Jacob Polley’s ‘Hide and Seek’, Joanna GavinsIndex

This collection represents the state of the art in the study of world-building as central to the comprehension of discourse generally and literature in particular. It is innovative and diverse both in terms of theory and applications: a real treat for discourse analysts, cognitive linguists and literary scholars.