This collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualization as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorizing and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. Stylisticians have particular expertise in the form, function and structure of language in discourse which far from delimiting the text can be usefully applied to interpretive approaches in literature. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts from Puttenham to Colemanballs and a number of language-sensitive topics: from postmodernism, genre and newspaper representations to irony, gender, and narrative. This collection demonstrates the vitality and diversity of current practices of stylistic analysis and offers a variety of language-orientated ways into the reading and unmasking of texts. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics of linguistics and English studies.