School of English

This page shows the staff for the University of Nottingham's School of English in the UK. Please see here for the School of Education and English in China and the School of English in Malaysia.

Image of Peter Stockwell

Peter Stockwell

Professor of Literary Linguistics, Faculty of Arts

Contact

Biography

BA English Language and Literature (Liverpool 1988)

PhD (Liverpool 1991)

FEA (Fellow of the English Association) (from 2012)

I work in literary linguistics; cognitive poetics; stylistics; applied linguistics; science fiction; surrealism. I maintain an interest in sociolinguistics and in language education both in the UK and across the world. I have been a Vice-Dean, and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement. I have also spent 20 years involved in digital online education.

Teaching Summary

I don't see myself as a teacher in a direct sense. Instead I view my classes as places where research in literary linguistics - including my own - is presented to students for their own thinking.

Literary linguistics takes our best current knowledge of language and reading and applies it to questions of interpretation, aesthetics, literary value and criticism. My view is that it is the best and the proper way of pursuing literary scholarship. Any student who comes to one of my classes will be faced with a challenge to become a stylistician - and thereby to become a better literary critic, and a better thinker.

I believe that university classes should be intense, engaging and intellectually uncomfortable. The journey from new student of stylistics to a position of power over texts and readings is surprisingly short, and the best part of my job is seeing the light of understanding flick on in students' faces when they see what stylistics can do for them.

The measure of my success is not in snapshot surveys, module evaluations nor even the grades my students achieve: success is when one of my students, in 20 years time, takes a decision, or understands a part of their life, or takes a different direction from the one that otherwise they might have taken, as a delicate threaded and immeasurable consequence of something we worked through together years previously - and their life is enhanced by it.

Research Summary

Visit my Academia page for full details of my research. You will be able to download some of my work there: most articles beyond a year or so ago, plus the full text of some books. Please do support… read more

Selected Publications

  • P. STOCKWELL, 2020. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction Second edition. Routledge.
  • P. STOCKWELL, 2017. The Language of Surrealism Palgrave Macmillan.
  • M. MAHLBERG, P. STOCKWELL and V. WIEGAND, 2017. Corpus Stylistics: An Activity Book for Teachers NATE.
  • P. STOCKWELL and S. WHITELEY, eds., 2014. The Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge University Press.

School of English

Trent Building
The University of Nottingham
University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5900
email: english-enquiries@nottingham.ac.uk