Over recent years, Cognitive Grammar (CG) has emerged as a credible and innovative tool for stylisticians. In 2014, Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell, and Wenjuan Yuan coedited Cognitive Grammar in Literature, which is the first book-length application of CG to literary texts. After seven years of development, the application of CG has reached outside of the realm of literature, inspiring Louise Nuttall and Chloe Harrison to team up with Marcello Giovanelli to edit another book New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style in 2021. This collection is the most recent piece of “Advances in Stylistics” series produced by Bloomsbury Publishing.Besides “Introduction” and “Coda,” the collection includes thirteen papers, which are divided into four parts, namely, “CG in literary contexts,” “CG in nonliterary contexts,” “CG in multimodal contexts,” and “CG in educational contexts.” Chapter 1 (Introduction) introduces the fundamental position and core concepts of CG within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics and gives an overview of the current development of the stylistic application of CG.Part I consists of four chapters that deal with how CG can be used to address new questions in traditional literary genres like novels and poetry in some ways. In Chapter 2, Peter Stockwell, the leading figure in cognitive poetics, recognizes that the traditional stylistic approach to free indirect discourse (FID), though highly productive, primarily focuses on the stylistic manifestations, serving to deemphasize the cognitive dimension. Therefore, he makes a stylistic account of FID by drawing on CG and Text World Theory. Based on the analysis of several excerpts from Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Emma, Lolita, and so on, he suggests that “FID is fundamentally and schematically a perspectival phenomenon, so it is most amenable to a linguistic approach grounded in spatial metaphor and positioning” (23).In Chapter 3, Anne Holm explores the relationship between the theme and narrative features in Mohsin Hamid’s speculative fiction novel Exit West (2017). Holm argues that the novel is rooted in two conceptual metaphors—“LIFE IS A JOURNEY” and “LIFE IS A STORY”—which indicate the opposing conceptualizations of time, “the Moving Ego” and “Moving Time,” respectively. Holm claims that the author adopted conflicting narrative strategies concerning elements like perspective, specificity, narrative speed, and so on to represent characters’ experience of movement in different episodes. Drawing on concepts in CG, Holm reveals the readers’ multiperspective and dynamic construal of the plot. In his view, the disruption of sequentiality and narrative order caused by stylistic diversity foregrounds the narrator’s struggle with feelings of displacement, echoing the novel’s theme “being a migrant through time” (35).In Chapter 4, Nigel McLoughlin analyzes Francis Harvey’s poem The Deaf Woman in the Glen with a framework built on CG and Conceptual Blending Theory. His aim is to reveal how the construal relations and blending structures in the poem can achieve the effect that, in Moya Cannon’s words, a character can be “so much part of the bone and nerve of their landscape” (1). His analysis shows that the complicated metaphorical mappings and blending create in readers’ minds a mental representation of the woman made up of various parts and qualities of the landscape and a mental representation of the landscape taking on qualities associated with the woman, most explicitly concerning “hair” and “haunches.”In Chapter 5, Louise Nuttall examines the morality of E. E. Cummings’ poem Me Up at Does through a CG analysis of its distinctive, unconventional style and grammatical makeup. Nuttall uses concepts like prominence, perspective, and mind-modeling to explain the foregrounded language of the poem and its iconic interpretation. And he argues that it is the distinctive nature of this processing, specifically, the poem’s manipulation of cognitive mechanisms of attention, scanning, and simulation that results in an enactment of the discomfort and guilt that the poem expresses.Part II includes three articles under the label “CG in nonliterary contexts.” In Chapter 6, Christopher Hart exemplifies how CG can be applied to critical discourse analysis with a case study of UK and US press coverage of two events that took place on the Gaza–Israel border in 2018 in which large numbers of Palestinian civilians were killed or wounded. Based on concepts of action chain and construal, Hart identifies three types of mystification in the coverage: agent-based mystification, patient-based mystification, and multimodal mystification. His analysis shows that the three types of mystification can reveal how this press coverage achieves certain discourse purposes through narrative and stylistic techniques. For example, some reports may downplay the killers’ responsibility for the death and avoid evoking the reader’s negative emotions toward them.In Chapter 7, Sam Browse investigates how sociopolitical context can influence active audiences’ reception of political texts. He carried out two “think aloud” activities, in which seven political activists who are members of the Labour Party and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn are invited to respond to two speeches by the then British Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, and the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The experiment results unsurprisingly show that seven participants all negatively commented on May’s speech and made positive or constructive comments about Corbyn’s. Browse then uses “construal theory” and Text World Theory to analyze their comments and suggests that the participants’ interpretation process of two speeches is significantly constrained by their shared repertoire of conceptual-ideological frames.Chapter 8 contributes to the research on how CG can scale its analysis of sentences to the level of discourse while maintaining the precision of its clause-level modeling by suggesting to consider “intentionality of actions” as a bridge between sentence construal and discourse interpretation. Drawing on concepts, such as the canonical event model and action chains, Matthew Voice advanced an intentionality model, which is “not the analysis of a single linguistic feature, but the conceptualization of an impression construed through many different elements and contexts, often in concordance with one another” (140). To demonstrate its effectiveness in discourse analysis, Voice applies the model to the analysis of an episode from the memoir of a British soldier who served in World War I, in which the soldier described how he killed an enemy sniper.The following three articles in Part III involve CG in a multimodal context. In Chapter 9, drawing on concepts like viewing arrangements and construal, Richard Finn examines how mind-modeling discursive conceptualizers in comics can take place at multiple levels across both depiction and narration. By analyzing the shifting focus on focal subjectivity in an example taken from Bechdel’s autobiographical comic Are You My Mother? (2012), Finn suggests that through mind-modeling and integrating conceptualizers as discourse progresses, comic readers can imagine complex subjectivities with reference points in different times, spaces, and worlds.In Chapter 10, Clara Neary applies CG and Zbikowski’s theory of Musical Grammar (MG) to Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song.” Drawing on the action chain model and construal theory, Neary shows the lyrics of the song construct its central themes of ambiguity and temporality through grammatical techniques like the subject–object ambiguity, space and time contradiction, and so on. And based on Zbikowski’s MG, he reveals that the rhythmic structure of “Pyramid Song” interacts with the lyrics to unsettle the listener by preventing them from experiencing the anticipated comfort of familiarity. At the end of this article, Neary concludes that “structurally, musically and lyrically, ‘Pyramid Song’ emphasizes ‘our need for ambiguity’ in the interpretive process and highlights the crucial space that ambiguity carves out for the experience of ‘our feelings and personal stories’” (197).Zbikowski’s MG reappears in Chapter 11, in which Alison Bown combined CG and MG with Chion’s framework of listening and Barsalou’s study of multisensory simulation. Taking Annihilation by Jeff Vander Meer and Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert as examples, Bown shows that these theoretical frameworks can collaboratively help to analyze how multimodal simulations are built in the reading process and to understand how even small amounts of text can cue very rich dynamic scenes in the mind of the reader. Bown suggests that the study on readers’ multisensory simulation empowers writers to take advantage of language to create multimodal works, which elicit readers’ spatial–temporal immersion.Part IV considers how CG is involved in educational contexts. In Chapter 12, Marcello Giovanelli and Chloe Harrison introduce the challenging process of their designing and writing the textbook Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics: A Practical Guide. They point out that, although CG offers a plausible model for analyzing various discourse types, it remains peripheral in the stylistics classroom due to its theoretical complexities. Therefore, they attempt to recontextualize CG from a theoretical model into a pedagogical one in their textbook, which provided a suitable and accessible CG to support students undertaking textual analysis in the stylistics classroom. With examples of activities from their book, they demonstrate the various ways in which CG can support students to engage with different text types.Ian Cushing follows this study in Chapter 13 to explore the value and suitability of CG as a pedagogical grammar in L1 education. Cushing introduces his collaborative practice with two secondary schoolteachers in London. They have devised a series of poetry lessons and activities informed by concepts from CG, namely construal, action chains, and energy transfer. A case study on William Carlos Williams’ poem Dawn demonstrates that a CG-driven pedagogy will enable students to explore key aspects of the poem and to reflect on their interpretations in novel ways. Finally, Cushing emphasizes that the kind of linguistic knowledge that is afforded by CG should be available to all teachers of English.In Chapter 14, Sally Zacharias addresses linguistic knowledge in the secondary classroom. Zacharias proposes a model of linguistic knowledge that draws on principles of both CG and Text World Theory and applies it to the analysis of two episodes of classroom discourse taken from one science lesson and a researcher–student interview in a secondary school in the United Kingdom. The analysis demonstrates that his model can provide both teachers and researchers with a means to unpack learners’ understandings of discipline-specific abstract concepts. In Coda, three editors provide a brief summary of this collection and indicate that scalability and the intersubjective negotiation of meaning are two significant concerns for CG and style in this book.As the first volume to systematically apply CG in contexts beyond literature, this collection is a recommendable read for scholars interested in cognitive poetics, cognitive stylistics, critical discourse analysis, and multimodal research. First, the whole book has a clear structure and is an easy read. The thirteen articles are categorized into four application areas so that readers can choose to read what they are interested in. Within each chapter, related concepts are introduced first and the textual analysis is presented in the following section. This kind of writing style makes it accessible for readers even with little knowledge of CG. Second, most of the contributors are familiar and productive figures who are always engaged in the international academic frontier of cognitive poetics, cognitive discourse analysis, cognitive stylistics, and so on. In this collection, based on their varied academic backgrounds and research interests, the contributors effectively demonstrate the productive ways in which generalized concepts from cognitive linguistics can be applied to describe specific effects and issues resulting from our engagement with texts. Third, this collection follows the cognitive and interdisciplinary trend in humanities and convinces readers of the usefulness of CG in both traditional literary texts like poetry and novels as well as unconventional text like autobiographical picture books, songs and lyrics, interactive electronic texts, news discourse, political speech, war memoirs, and educational discourse. It testifies to the vast potential for CG applications and enriches the toolkit of cognitive poetics, cognitive stylistics, multimodal research, and critical discourse analysis. Finally, the readers are provided with many exemplary analyses, which are good materials for beginners to learn how to carry out their research with CG concepts.However, the book inevitably reveals some flaws. The contributors mostly concentrate on familiar concepts like construal and action chain or theories like Text World Theory. To fully illustrate the value of CG in stylistics, it would be useful to introduce some lesser-known concepts from CG, and this kind of practice should not be restricted to Langacker’s theory of CG. Although the introduction to concepts in each chapter makes the chapters independently comprehensible, the repeated introductions to the same concepts in several chapters make the whole book somewhat cumbersome. More importantly, most chapters are theory-oriented rather than text-focused, so the text analysis in each chapter is often illustrative rather than exhaustive. The analysis of isolated and decontextualized sentences may cast doubts over the value of CG. Although cognitive studies are concerned more about “how” and “why” than “what,” the preferred way to display the potential of CG is to show what we can get from the target discourse with the help of CG, rather than just make some presumptions on readers’ cognitive mechanism. This is vital for all cognitive approaches to literary or nonliterary texts. To be frank, some studies in this collection fail to achieve this goal. For instance, Sam Browse’s study on readers’ reception of political texts makes little sense in this view, as the participants are problematic but also because the findings are self-evident.Despite some imperfections, the book presents cutting-edge research in stylistics and discourse inflected by CG.