World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory. The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants. The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists. “This collection represents the state of the art in the study of world-building as central to the comprehension of discourse generally and literature in particular. It is innovative and diverse both in terms of theory and applications: a real treat for discourse analysts, cognitive linguists and literary scholars.” ―Elena Semino, Head of Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK “This fascinating volume explores the unexpected but orderly complexity of the mental construction of meaning. It shows us the cognitive poetics not just of texts but of everyday life.” ―Mark Turner, Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, USA “There is a pervasive sense of coherence throughout the entire volume which makes reading the entire volume a seamless experience ... World Building: Discourse in the Mind is an immensely important contribution to the study of the interrelation between narrative, discourse, and cognition ... Needless to say, the volume will primarily appeal to cognitively oriented researchers within these fields, but I would encourage researchers and postgraduate students alike within these fields more generally to engage with the volume even if cognition is not their primary research interest.” ― The Linguist List Joanna Gavins is Reader in Literary Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, UK. Daniel McIntyre is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Uppsala University, Sweden. Ernestine Lahey is Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Stylistics at University College Roosevelt, Netherlands. She has published widely on subjects relating to (cognitive) stylistics, Text World Theory and Canadian literature and culture. Brian Walker is a Visiting Researcher at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His research interests are in stylistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics, especially applied to literary and political discourses. He has co-authored books on discourse analysis (Canning and Walker 2024), stylistics (Lugea and Walker 2023), corpus stylistics (McIntyre and Walker 2019) and socio-political keywords (Jeffries and Walker 2017). His other published research focuses on using corpus linguistic approaches to analyse poetry (McIntyre and Walker 2022), discourses of austerity (Jeffries and Walker 2019, 2020), and Early Modern English news pamphlets (Walker and McIntyre 2015).