Rethinking Language, Text and Context

This collection of original research highlights the legacy of Michael Toolan’s pioneering contributions to the field of stylistics and in so doing provides a critical overview of the ways in which language, text, and context are analyzed in the field and its related disciplines. Featuring work from an international range of contributors, the book illustrates how the field of stylistics has evolved in the 25 years since the publication of Toolan’s seminal Language, Text and Context, which laid the foundation for the analysis of the language and style in literary texts. The volume demonstrates how technological innovations and the development of new interdisciplinary methodologies, including those from corpus, cognitive, and multimodal stylistics, point to the greater degree of interplay between language, text, and context exemplified in current research and how this dynamic relationship can be understood by featuring examples from a variety of texts and media. Underscoring the significance of Michael Toolan’s extensive work in the field in the evolution of literary linguistic research, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in stylistics, discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

Ruth Page is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. Her publications include Stories and Social Media (Routledge, 2012), Narratives Online: Shared Stories and Social Media (2018), and Researching the Language of Social Media (Routledge, 2014). She is the editor of Discourse, Context & Media.

Beatrix Busse is Professor of English Linguistics at Heidelberg University. Her research interests include the history of English, English historical linguistic and Shakespeare studies, stylistics and corpus linguistics. She is the co-editor of the series Discourse Patterns and reviews editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.

Nina Nørgaard is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Multimodal Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests lie within the fields of stylistics, multimodality, multimodal stylistics, critical discourse analysis and the semiotics of architecture. She has a keen interest in combining work and insights from the (traditionally separated) fields of stylistics and multimodality. Her major publications include Key Terms in Stylistics (2010; co-edited with Beatrix Busse and Rocio Montoro) and Multimodal Stylistics of the Novel: More than Words (2018).