Michael Toolan
List of John Benjamins publications in which Michael Toolan is involved.
Book series
ISSN 1569-3112
Title
Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A corpus stylistic approach
Michael Toolan
One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book… read more[Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 6] 2009. xi, 212 pp.
2026 Chapter 6. On satire and The Third Policeman Practising Stylistics: Essays in Honour of Paul Simpson, Neary, Clara, Simon Statham and Peter Stockwell (eds.), pp. 70–85 | Chapter
Simpson’s doctoral thesis (1984, see also 1986, 1997) presented an innovative stylistic account of Flann O’Brien’s absurdist or post-modernist novel The Third Policeman, originally written around 1940 but not published until 1967. This early stylistic work drew on sociolinguistic patterns in… read more
2025 Chapter 9. Verbal pickles and pickling: A stylistic engagement with Sinéad Morrissey’s “Through the Square Window”, with help from Philip Larkin and Peter Verdonk Style as Motivated Choice: In memory of Peter Verdonk (1934–2021), Burke, Michael and Joanna Gavins (eds.), pp. 148–158 | Chapter
Peter Verdonk championed canonical modern poets from Great Britain and Ireland, and was well aware of how they sometimes composed “in dialogue” with their antecedent peers (Heaney responding to Hardy, for example). Here I speculate on how he might have admired poems by Sinéad Morrissey, even… read more
2019 Chapter 7. Doing and teaching: From Kettle of Roses to Language and Creative
Illusion and back again Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language: In memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926-2015), Simpson, Paul (ed.), pp. 113–126 | Chapter
This chapter explores the continuity between Bill Nash’s academic
work on style and stylistics and his fiction writing. In both forms, Nash
aimed to instruct and entertain, and saw that to achieve those ends one had
to be seriously playful and use a creative imagination. The… read more
2015 Review of Evans (2014): The Language Myth: Why language is not an instinct.. Language and Dialogue 5:3, pp. 471–484 | Review
2011 Chapter 9. “I don’t know what they’re saying half the time, but I’m hooked on the series”: Incomprehensible dialogue and integrated multimodal characterisation in The Wire Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the language of films and television series, Piazza, Roberta, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), pp. 161–183 | Article
This paper analyses and discusses dialogue in the hugely-celebrated HBO series, The Wire (2002–2008). One paradox that particularly interests me is that the dialogue is “involvingly incomprehensible” or, to be more precise, that it is quite difficult to understand fully, but no less absorbing and… read more
2009 Trust and text, text as trust Words, Grammar, Text: Revisiting the work of John Sinclair, Moon, Rosamund (ed.), pp. 105–122 | Article
2007 Are Brummies developing narrative of European identity? The Discourse of Europe: Talk and text in everyday life, Millar, Sharon and John Wilson (eds.), pp. 79–94 | Article
2007 Trust and text, text as trust Words, grammar, text: revisiting the work of John Sinclair, Moon, Rosamund (ed.), pp. 269–288 | Article
In this essay I celebrate and interrogate John Sinclair’s seminal paper, ‘Trust the text’, a paper in which several radically new ideas about the role of prospection and encapsulation in the reader’s processing of text are outlined. I mention some of the ways in which trust is fundamental to… read more