Textual Explorations SeriesGeneral Editors:Mick Short, Lancaster UniversityElena Semino, Lancaster UniversityThe focus of this new series is on the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, and the theoretical issues which such work raises. Textual Explorations will include books that cover studies of literary authors, genres and other groupings, stylistic studies of non-literary texts, translation study, the teaching of language and literature, the empirical study of literature, and corpus approaches to stylistics and literature study. Books in the series will centre on texts written in English. Readership of the series will be mainly undergraduate and postgraduate students, although advanced sixth formers will also find the books accessible. The series will be of particular interest to those who study English language, English literature, text linguistics, discourse analysis, and communication studies.Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts introduces an interdisciplinary and practical approach to the analysis of poetry which focuses on text worlds, namely the contexts, scenarios or types of reality that readers construct in their interaction with the language of texts. The book demonstrates in detail three ways of approaching poetic text worlds, namely as discourse situations, possible-worlds, and mental constructs. Clear and detailed introductions to linguistic theories of definiteness and deixis, possible-world theory and schema theory are included, making the book accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with these frameworks. Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts is the first book in this field which:*focuses on text worlds in poetry;*applies possible-world and schema theory to poetry in a systematic way. A wide range of British and American poems in English are analysed, and brief sample analyses of non-poetic texts are also included. Suggestions for further analysis are made at the end of each chapter to enable the reader to gain a greater understanding of the material that is covered, and to encourage the practical application of a similar type of analysis to other genres including novels, short stories, plays, advertisements and jokes.The text will be welcomed by undergraduate and postgraduate students of language, literary criticism and literary theory as well as linguists who are interested in the study of literature and texts. Elena Semino is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University. She has published extensively in the field of stylistics, and was awarded the 1995 Poetics and Linguistics Association Prize for the best article published by a young academic.