Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction [Paperback]

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammaradvances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar.

Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text.Mind Style and Cognitive Grammaradvances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.

This book proposes a new and compelling account of a central phenomenon in the reading of narrative fiction: mind style, or the experiencing of distinctive characters' minds in response to patterns of linguistic choices in texts. By systematically applying insights from cognitive grammar to the language of Atwood'sThe Handmaid's Tale, Ishiguro'sNever Let Me Go,Matheson'sI am Legendand Ballard'sThe Drowned World, Nuttall makes a ground-breaking contribution to cognitive poetics/stylistics, cognitive linguistics and the study of speculative fiction. Elena Semino, Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art, Lancaster University, UK

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammaroffers a fascinating, text-driven al³