Constructing a text-world for The Handmaid's Tale

This chapter explores the benefits of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) for analysis of the dynamic process of world-building during literary reading. Building on the account of this process offered by Text World Theory (Gavins 2007) concepts from Cognitive Grammar are applied to account for the readerly experience of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Through this analysis, the chapter offers an account of the disrupted conceptualisation of its dystopian world and the distinctive 'mind style' of its narrator in psychologically realistic terms