Reading the Absurd

What is the literary absurd? What are its key textual features? How can it be analysed? How do different readers respond to absurdist literature? Taking the theories and methodologies of stylistics as its underlying analytical framework, Reading the Absurd tackles each of these questions. Selected key works in English literature are examined in depth to reveal significant aspects of absurd style. Its analytical approach combines stylistic inquiry with a cognitive perspective on language, literature and reading which sheds new light on the human experience of literary reading. By exploring the literary absurd as a linguistic and experiential phenomena, while at the same time reflecting upon its essential historical and cultural situation, Joanna Gavins brings a new perspective to the absurd aesthetic.

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 CRITICISM A 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