Text World Theory is a cognitive model of all human discourse processing. In this introductory textbook, Joanna Gavins sets out a usable framework for understanding mental representations. Text World Theory is explained using naturally occurring texts and real situations, including literary works, advertising discourse, the language of lonely hearts, horoscopes, route directions, cookery books and song lyrics. The book will therefore enable students, teachers and researchers to make practical use of the text-world framework in a wide range of linguistic and literary contexts.

Uses and further develops text world theory via stylistic exploration of Keat's poetry.

World Building 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. 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.

Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book, but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types, from poetry to genre-specific prose to children’s story-books. This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated, how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds, and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory, reader-response studies, and pedagogical stylistics, among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics, stylistics, narratology, and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Malta, course: ENG 3016 Language and the Literary Mind, language: English, abstract: The present work takes a closer look at Text World Theory through analysing Margaret Atwood’s novella "The Penelopiad". Text World Theory (TWT) analyses the mental representations human beings create when indulging in any kind of discourse, the written as well as the spoken one. It structures these mental representations in worlds which have a certain hierarchy between each other. Since Professor Paul Werth developed this theory in the 1980s and 1990s, it has been revised and restructured several times. The question arises whether the structure of TWT is still in need of improvement, as Werth’s three-dimensional structure already proved to be unsatisfactory to some text-world researchers, like Joanna Gavins. To answer this question, I will look at the mental representation of worlds Margaret Atwood’s novella "The Penelopiad" is able to generate. I am going to argue that this novella is proof that there can be more than one Text World (TW). From these TW, further types of worlds can be created, like Sub-Worlds (SW), Possible Worlds (PW) and in-Text Worlds (iTW), a term which I personally coined. I will try to prove that the major difference between TW and the other world types is the point of view from which they are told. As the size of the assignment does not allow to analyze the whole TWT structure of "The Penelopiad" in depth, I am going to concentrate on certain aspects only. First of all, it will be the structure in a whole that is going to be the focus and not the content of the single worlds. Furthermore, the parts which deviate from the traditional structure of TWT will be granted more attention than those which overlap it. Finally, only the worlds which are told from Penelope’s perspective will be analyzed. This implies that the TW of the Maids (TW4) will just be mentioned, but not analyzed. Consequently, a lot of this topic will still be open for discussion. "The Penelopiad" is suitable for a TWT analysis as it is set in the particular domain of gender studies.

Said demonstrates that critical discourse has been strengthened by the writings of Derrida and Foucault and by influences like Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. But, he argues, these forces have compelled literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.