Language and Meaning in Literature

Is a literary text an act of communication, and if so, how does it work? Relating works of literature to everyday utterances, this book focuses on the relationship between meaning and language in literary works. It uses an influential theory from linguistic pragmatics, relevance theory, to reveal a connection between literature and ordinary talk, while maintaining that the effect of literariness is achieved through exploiting the communicative options open to us more deeply and in more complex ways in poetry and prose fiction. It provides an accessible introduction to relevance theory and connects the theory to ideas in evolutionary cognitive psychology, whilst also comparing it to other approaches in stylistics, literary studies and pragmatics. This book also includes detailed analyses of literary texts, supported with linguistic descriptions of form, examining texts and textual features such as satire, first and third person narratives, sound-patterned poetry, comic rhymes, literary parodies and metaphor.

• Publication date: 30 September 2026
• Page count: 250
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781107131897