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This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as examples and imaginary dialogues that forestall potential objections. How to Do Things with Words is not the triumphant establishment of a fully elaborated theory of speech acts, but the story of a failure...
Since Speech in the English Novel first appeared in 1973, it has won international recognition as an important pioneering study of a topic that lies on the frontiers of literature and linguistics - the nature and function of fictional dialogue and its relationship to real speech. Drawing on a wide range of examples from many periods, the book includes general and theoretical chapters and also case-studies of particular texts, as well as a whole chapter devoted to Dickens. It has been found stimulating and useful by teachers and students in many countries, and has been praised by numerous scholars. The Year's Work in English Studies described it as a 'classic'; Studia Neophilologica said that it 'opened up new vistas for research'; Language and Style found that it 'admirably bridges the gap between linguistics and English studies', and English Studies judged it 'a thoroughly readable and even entertaining book'. This new edition incorporates numerous revisions, new examples, and additions to the bibliographies.
Can a speaker's words ever be faithfully reported? History, philosophy, ethnography, political theory, linguistics, and literary criticism all involve debates about discourse and representation. By drawing from Plato's theory of discourse, the lively analysis of speech presentation in this book provides a coherent and original contribution to these debates, and highlights the problems involved when speech becomes both the object and the medium of narrative representation. The opening chapters offer fresh insights on ideology, intertextuality, literary language, and historiography, and reveal important connections between them. These insights are then applied in specific critical treatments of - Virgil's Aeneid, of Petronius' Satyricon, and of scenes involving messengers and angels in classical and European epic. Throughout this study, ancient texts are discussed in conjunction with examples from later traditions. Overall, this book uses Latin literature to demonstrate the theoretical and ideological importance of speech presentation for a number of contemporary disciplines.
This is an exciting new series of lively, original and authoritative studies aimed at the student and general reader. Each book takes as its subject an author, genre or a single text. Some titles guide students through the perplexing crosscurrent of critical debate by offering fresh and fortnight reappraisals of their subjects which are of importance and value to the student.
The book introduces the reader into the world of mental perception of literary contents. Based on the research in modern semantics, functional stylistics and cognitive phonetics, it explores the way linguistic elements of a literary work cause readers to form a single perception shape identified as a cultural, literary or social stereotype.
The fifth volume of the Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative deals with speech: it discusses the types, modes and functions of speech in narrative, the boundaries between speech and narrative context, and the absence of speech (silence).
Rather than giving the student a list of facts to assimilate this book offers a selection of standard and non-standard pieces of spoken and written English that the reader uses to formulate opinions on structure and lexis for further self-study.
Foreign accents in fiction are a common stylistic instrument of marking a character as the ‘Other’ and conveying national stereotypes in literature. This study investigates in a qualitative analysis the linguistic characteristics of non-native fictional speech, with a specific focus on the English Renaissance, the Victorian Age and the 20th-century war decades. After examining the concept of national identity and the image of the foreigner in these eras, the study undertakes an in-depth linguistic analysis of a literary corpus of drama and prose. Recurring patterns in non-native fictional speech are uncovered and set into relation with the socio-cultural background of the respective work, which leads to intriguing findings about the changing image of the foreigner and the phenomenon of linguistic stereotying in English literature.
In this activity-based text, Rebecca Hughes invites the reader to examine the differences between spoken and written English. Instead of presenting a bewildering array of 'facts' about variety in English, she encourages the reader to actively investigate the differences between these two modes of communication by comparing actual speech patterns with literary ones. This indispensable guide to the basic methods of analysis provides both an overview of the relationship between speech and writing and an introduction to a central theoretical issue in language studies. By the end of the book, readers will have had the opportunity to consider material from an extensive selection of spoken and written varieties - including boxing commentaries, detective novels and film scripts - while being encouraged to formulate their own opinions with regard to lexis and structure. In addition, the tasks that have been incorporated into the end of every chapter provide suggestions for further self-study and follow-up work.
A collection of essays, each tackling a Renaissance figure of speech in literature.