In treating the topic of the landscapes of stylistics, this book provides a series of chapters which deal not only with physical landscapes but also with social, mental, historical portraits of places, people and society. The chapters demonstrate that all texts project a worldview, even when the content appears to be only a physical description of the external world. The implication is that texts attempt to produce specific effects on the reader determined by the author’s worldview. Contents and effects, (namely mental and emotional states, behaviours), are thus inseparable. Identifying those effects and how they are produced is an eminently cognitive operation. The chapters analyse a variety of linguistic devices and cognitive mechanisms employed in producing the text and accounting for the effects achieved. Though the majority of the chapters have a cognitive basis, a wide range of methodologies are employed, including ecostylistics, offering cutting-edge theoretical approaches teamed up with close reading. A further crucial feature of this collection is the selection of non-canonical texts, ranging from lesser-known texts in English to significant works in languages other than English, all of which are characterised by important social themes, thus emphasising the importance of critical appreciation as a means of self-empowerment.

This book reflects the cutting edge in ecostylistic approaches to nature, the environment and sustainability as represented in contemporary non-literary discourse. Firstly, the book presents the ecolinguistic and stylistic terms and theories applied in this ecostylistic analysis (ecosophy, beneficial, ambivalent and destructive discourses; and foregrounding, point of view, metaphor), and reviews the most recent literature in the field of ecostylistics. Secondly, the book examines the occurrences of five marker words (nature, environment, ecosystem, ecology, sustainability) on the websites of five environmental organisations and agencies (Forestry England, Greenpeace International, National Park Service, Navdanya International, World Wide Fund for Nature). The main research purpose of this study is to identify beneficial discourses in the environet and to investigate the beneficial ecostylistic strategies utilised to produce them. Above all, this book reminds us humans that we do not stand apart from nature: we are a part of it. The book will be of interest to scholars of stylistics, ecolinguistics and ecocriticism, as well as scholars of discourse analysis, environmental communication and environmental humanities.

The contributions in this collection offer a wide range of stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment, by focusing on a variety of text-types ranging from poetry, the Bible, fictional and non-fictional prose, to newspaper articles, condo names, online texts and exhibitions. Employing both established and cutting-edge methodologies from, among others, corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, Text World Theory and ecostylistics, the eleven chapters in the volume provide an overview of how landscape, place and environment are encoded and can be investigated in literary and non-literary discourse. The studies collected here stand as evidence of the possibility of, and the need for, a “stylistics of landscape”, which emphasises how represented spaces are made manifest linguistically; a “stylistics of place”, which focuses on the discursive and affective qualities of those represented spaces; and a “stylistics of environment”, which reiterates the urgency for environmentally-responsible humanities, able to support a change in the anthropocentric narrative which poses humans as the most important variable in the human-animal and human-environment relationships.

This book offers an up-to-date account of one of the most influential strands of eco-research: cognitive ecostylistics. The onset of the 1970s saw a global shift in scholarly perspective upon the relation between egocentric and ecocentric views of the world. The so-called eco-turn was not only linguistic at its roots, but engaged the bulk of academic thought in social sciences and humanities. Cognitive ecostylistics invites a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the conceptual relations between oral or written texts and their impact on the environment. This volume is a collection of the latest research that seeks to apply the theory and methodology developed over the last 40 years to both literary and real-life texts, engaging with a wealth of examples from First World War poetry and Anne of Green Gables through to Condé Nast Traveller hotel descriptions. Exploring the cultural effects of the eco-turn, the collection engages the reader in the problem of the present-day Anthropocene, manifested as Ego-Eco tensions at the level of communicating self-needs and the needs of the Other. Divided into two parts, it considers first the human-angled semiotic interplay contained within the universe of people, before examining the problem of semiotic engagement of texts as extraneous to the human, highlighting crucial aspects of nature, culture, and beyond.

This open access volume is a call for ecological awareness and action through communication. It offers perspectives on how we, as humans, posit ourselves in relation to, and as part of, the environment in both verbal and non-verbal discourse. The contributions investigate a variety of situated communicative practices and how they instantiate and potentially influence our actions. Through the frameworks of ecolinguistics, multimodal studies and ecoliteracy, the book discusses how the environmental crisis is communicated as an urgent global and local issue in a variety of media, texts and events. The contributions present a wide range of case studies (including news articles, institutional websites, artwork installations, promotional texts, signposting, social campaigns and other), and they explore how communicative actions can help meet the challenges of ecologically-oriented change. The focus is on the impact that linguistic and multimodal communication can have on acting in, with and towards the environment seen as living ecosystems, or 'lifescapes'. The chapters offer a reflection on the way we experience, endorse, reframe and resist value systems in ecological communication, and propose alternative and healthier perspectives to respect and preserve the common and nurturing lifescapes through awareness and action. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

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This book introduces a new way of looking at how poems mean, drawing on the framework first developed in the author’s book Critical Stylistics, but applied here to aesthetic more than ideological meaning. The aim is to empower readers of poetry to articulate the features of poetic language that they come across and explain to themselves and others why these features convey the meanings that they do. While this volume focuses on contemporary poets writing in English and mostly based in the UK and Ireland, the framework will work just as well for other eras’ poetry, as well as for other cultures and languages.