This textbook, based on extensive teaching experience,makes new insights from linguistic and literary scholarship accessible to students in their daily practice of reading, analysing and evaluating literary texts.

Series editor’s introduction Introduction 1 To analyse a poem stylistically: ‘To Paint a Water Lily’ by Ted Hughes 2 Person to person: relationships in the poetry of Tony Harrison 3 Approaching Hill’s ‘Of Commerce and Society’ through lexis 4 The lyrical game: C. Day Lewis’s ‘Last Words’ 5 Between languages: grammar and lexis in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ 6 The auditory imagination and the music of poetry 7 Teach yourself ‘rhetoric’: an analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ 8 (Non)-communication in the park 9 Poetry and public life: a contextualized reading of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’ 10 The difficult style of The Waste Land: a literary–pragmatic perspective on modernist poetry 11 The poem and occasion 12 ‘Yo soy la Malinche’: Chicana writers and the poetics of ethnonationalism