World Building

<p><i>World Building</i> represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines including stylistics cognitive poetics narratology discourse analysis and literary theory. <p/>The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds' 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants.<br>The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians linguists and narrative theorists.</p>