Reading the Absurd

The book examines a diverse range of literary texts, both prose and poetry, that readers identify as absurd and analyses the stylistic characteristics of this body of work using a cognitive-stylistic approach.It provides a coherent, linguistically rigorous examination of the discoursal features which characterise the absurd in literature.

Professor Joanna Gavins is Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield, where she teaches courses in cognitive linguistics and stylistics. She is the author of Text World Theory: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Reading the Absurd (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), co-editor (with Gerard Steen) of Cognitive Poetics in Practice (Routledge, 2003), and co-editor (with Ernestine Lahey) of World Building: Discourse in the Mind (Bloomsbury, 2016). She is the Director of the Text World Theory Special Collection at the University of Sheffield and Editor of the John Benjamins Linguistic Approaches to Literature book series.

List of Figures; Acknowledgements; 1 The Literary Absurd, THE ABSURD IN PHILOSOPHY, THE ABSURD IN LITERARY CRITICISMA NEW APPROACH, READERS OF THE ABSURD; 2 IDENTIFYING 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