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: the contexts, scenarios or types of reality that readers construct in their inter-action with the language of texts. The book demonstrates, through the analysis of British and American poems and non-poetic tetxs, 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.