An examination of what dialogues and direct speech in Old Norse literature can convey and mean, beyond their immediate face-value.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

Pointing the way toward a revitalized future for the study of literature, Reconstruction in Literary Studies draws on philosophical pragmatism to justify the academic study of literature. In turn, Vescio connects the changing field to its social function as an institution.

"A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.

This book charts an interdisciplinary narrative of literary pragmatism and creative democracy across the writings of African American women, from the works of nineteenth-century philosophers to the novels and short stories of Harlem Renaissance authors. The book argues that this critically neglected narrative forms a genealogy of black feminist intersectionality and a major contribution to the development of American pragmatism. Bringing together the philosophical writings of Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell and the fictional works of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, this text provides a literary pragmatist study of the archetypes, tropes, settings, and modes of resistance that populate the narrative of creative democracy. Above all, this book considers how these philosophers and authors construct democracy as a lived experience that gains meaning not through state institutions but through communities founded on relationships among black women and their shared understandings of culture, knowledge, experience, and rebellion.

A comprehensive case for a fresh literary approach to the New Testament For at least a half century, scholars have been adopting literary approaches to the New Testament inspired by certain branches of literary criticism and theory. In this important and illuminating work, Michal Beth Dinkler uses contemporary literary theory to enhance our understanding and interpretation of the New Testament texts. Dinkler provides an integrated approach to the relation between literary theory and biblical interpretation, employing a wide range of practical theories and methods. This indispensable work engages foundational concepts and figures, the historical contexts of various theoretical approaches, and ongoing literary scholarship into the twenty-first century. In Literary Theory and the New Testament, Dinkler assesses previous literary treatments of the New Testament and calls for a new phase of nuanced thinking about New Testament texts as both ancient and literary.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies, historical perspectives, and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them. Literary writers, through their handling of deixis, evaluative and modal expressions, tellability, politeness norms, and genre expectations, activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users, and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account, human beings are profoundly influenced by society, but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people, literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals”, who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy. As well as explaining these theoretical positions, the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers, including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure. The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of pragmatics of all theoretical stripes. It will also be a valuable resource for linguists in other fields, including philosophy of language, semantics, morphosyntax, prosody, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, and for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.

Our species has been searching for meaning throughout its evolutionary development. For us to understand one another, we must embark on a complex interpretative process. The aim of this text is to provide a theory of understanding and interpretation to clarify this communicative process.