Michael Toolan is Professor of English and Head of the English Language and Applied Linguistics Division at the University of Birmingham, where he convenes the MA programme in Literary Linguistics. He has published several books on stylistics (e.g., The Stylistics of Fiction, 1990; Language in Literature, 1998) and on narrative (Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 2nd edition, 2001). He is also editor of the Journal of Literary Semantics. His Narrative progression in the short story: a corpus stylistic approach appeared in 2009. He is preparing a monograph entitled Making Sense of Narrative Text.