Overview
- Explores the complex functioning of pronouns as part of the linguistic nuances of perspectives and positioning in literary texts
- Advances current scholarship on narrative voices and articulations of perspective
- Draws out underlying themes including reader engagement, the plurality of voices and worlds, metafictionality, ambiguity and unreliability, the problematisation of subjectivity and the ethical implications of subjective relationships
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About this book
This edited collection brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who together offer cutting-edge insights into the complex roles, functions, and effects of pronouns in literary texts. The book engages with a range of text-types, including poetry, drama, and prose from different periods and regions, in English and in translation. Beginning with analyses of the first-person pronoun, it moves onto studies of the subject dynamics of first- and second-person, before considering plural modes of narration and how pronoun use can help to disperse narrative perspective. The volume then debates the functional constraints of pronouns in fictional contexts and finally reflects upon the theoretical advancements presented in the collection. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, stylistics and cognitive poetics, narratology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology and literary criticism.
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Keywords
- pronouns
- narratology
- cognitive stylistics
- Literary Stylistics
- syntactic structure
- Literary linguistics
- corpus linguistics
- Deixis
- Text World Theory
- metalepsis
- indefinite pronouns
- polyvocal narration
- Autonarration
- second-person fiction
- Hamlet
- Shakespeare
- Langston Hughes
- Post-apartheid Literature
- postcolonial literature
- Ben Lerner
- literary diction
Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“when going through Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language, readers will find themselves on a magical tour of communicating with characters and narrators in literary texts of different times and regions. Due to the unique character and the flexible facet of pronouns in literature, this innovative volume will definitely appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, theoretical and applied linguistics, stylistics and cognitive poetics, psychology, narratology and literary criticism.” (Yanli Jia, Language and Literature, August, 2018)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (2012), co-author of Contemporary Stylistics: Language, Interpretation, Cognition (2018), and co-editor of Mark Z. Danielewski (2011), Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012), and Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (2017).
Andrea Macrae is Senior Lecturer in Stylistics at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She specialises in deixis and has published work on pronouns in the Journal of Literary Semantics (2010), the journal Diegesis (2016), and in The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns (2015) and Texts and Minds (2012).
Andrea Macrae is Senior Lecturer in Stylistics at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She specialises in deixis and has published work on pronouns in the Journal of Literary Semantics (2010), the journal Diegesis (2016), and in The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns (2015) and Texts and Minds (2012).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Pronouns in Literature
Book Subtitle: Positions and Perspectives in Language
Editors: Alison Gibbons, Andrea Macrae
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95316-5Published: 23 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95794-1Published: 07 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-349-95317-2Published: 04 January 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 279
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Language and Literature, Discourse Analysis, Stylistics, Literary Theory, Creative Writing, Grammar