List of tables and figures; Notes on contributors; Preface and acknowledgements; Part I Situated fashions of speaking and writing: from nonsense to common sense; 1 Making (non)sense of postmodernist poetry Brian McHale 2 Insider reading and linguistics form: contextual knowledge and the reading of linguistic discourse George Dillon 3 Grammaticalizing the medical case history Gill Francis and Anneliese Kramer Dahl 4 Reconstructing the interpretative conventions of Elizabethan readers Eugene R. Kintgen; Part II Strategic Styles; 5 Free indirect discourse in the eighteenth-century English novel: speakable or unspeakable? The example of Sir Charles Grandison Anne Waldron Naumann 6 Lexicogrammar and the reader: three examples from Dickens Norman Macleod; Part III Positioning styles: framing women in language; 7 Power and mutuality in Middlemarch Marie Paule Hastert and Jean Jacques Weber 8 Knowing your place: a Marxist feminist stylistic analysis Sara Mills 9 The linguistics of blame: representations of women in the The Sun’s reporting of crimes of sexual violence Kate Clark 10 Gender, genre and generative grammar: deconstructing the matrimonial column Rukmini Bhaya Nair; Part IV: Styles of incongruity: the pragmatics of oddness and daftness; 11 Pragmatic principles in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell Geoffrey Leach 12 The pragmatics of nonsense: towards a stylistics of Private Eye’s Colemanballs Paul Simpson; Bibliography; Index