World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last forty 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.

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.
The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.

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 Contributors
1. 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 Lahey
4. 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 Gibbons
6. Speaker Enactors in Oral Narrative, Isabelle van der Bom
7. Text World Theory as Cognitive Grammatics: a Pedagogical Application in the Secondary Classroom, Marcello Giovanelli
8. Worlds from Words: Theories of World-building as Creative Writing Toolbox, Jeremy Scott
9. The Texture of Authorial Intention, Peter Stockwell
10. Building Resonant Worlds: Experiencing the Text-Worlds of The Unconsoled, Sara Whiteley
11. 'This is not the end of the world': Situating Metaphor in the Text-Worlds of the 2008 British Financial Crisis, Sam Browse
12. The Humorous Worlds of Film Comedy, Agnes Marszalek
13. 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 Harbus
15. 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 Gavins
Index