Preface xiiimaking. Gradually, the range of text types that stylisticians engage with have furthermore
expanded to also comprise non-fictional texts such as news reports, advertising, doctor-
patient discourse, academic writing, etc. While forceful in its rigour and systematism, the
traditional stylistic approach (whether of a formalist, functionalist, cognitive or other
orientation) has until recently largely failed to embrace meanings which are created by
semiotic systems other than the verbal. By fusing the theories, methodologies and practices of
stylistics and multimodal semiotics, multimodal stylistics is a new direction in the field which
aims to develop analytical frameworks that will allow systematic analysis of literature and
other types of text which, in addition to wording, employ semiotic modes such as e.g.
typography, layout, visual images and colour for their meaning-making. It is the aim of this
article to provide a brief introduction to this new semiotic trend in stylistics, its promises,
problems and areas which need to be explored.