The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience and cover core issues that include:

• historical perspectives centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism
• the elements of stylistic analysis that include the linguistic levels of foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech acts, speech and thought presentation and point of view
• current areas of 'hot topic' research, such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics and feminist/critical stylistics
• emerging and future trends including the stylistics of multimodality, creative writing, hypertext fiction and neuroscience

Each of the thirty-two chapters provides: an introduction to the subject; an overview of the history of the topic; an analysis of the main current and critical issues; a section with recommendations for practice, and a discussion of possible future trajectory of the subject.

This handbook includes chapters written by some of the leading stylistics scholars in the world today, including Jean Boase-Beier, Joe Bray, Michael Burke, Beatrix Busse, Ronald Carter, Billy Clark, Barbara Dancygier, Catherine Emmott, Charles Forceville, Margaret Freeman, Christiana Gregoriou, Geoff Hall, Patrick Colm Hogan, Lesley Jeffries, Marina Lambrou, Michaela Mahlberg, Rocio Montoro, Nina N rgaard, Dan Shen, Michael Toolan and Sonia Zyngier.

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.