Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at University Paul Valéry of Montpellier 3, France.An innovative and insightful volume about manipulation in literary texts.
Cercles Book Review
This is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays on how texts manipulate readers – and how readers manipulate texts – as well as a real demonstration of the breadth and depth of contemporary stylistic inquiry.
Sam Browse, Senior Lecturer in English Language, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
This book focuses on how readers can be ‘manipulated’ during their experience of reading fictional texts and how they are incited to perceive, process and interpret certain textual patterns. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry and novels, the book deciphers various linguistic, pragmatic and multimodal techniques. These are skilfully used by authors to achieve specific effects through a subtle manipulation of deixis, metalepsis, dialogue, metaphors, endings, inferences or rhetorical, narratorial and typographical control.
Exploring contemporary texts such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin, chapters delve into how readers are pragmatically positioned or cognitively (mis)directed as the author guides their attention and influences their judgment. They also show how readers’ responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation as readers challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.
1. Introduction: Manipulation in Fiction, Sandrine Sorlin (University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
Part I. Manipulating Positions, Representations and Viewpoints
2. Metalepsis, Counterfactuality and the Forked Path in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Marina Lambrou (Kingston University, UK)
3. Social Deixis in Literature, Andrea Macrae (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
4. ‘The Novel of the Future’: Author’s Manipulation in Henry Green’s Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952), Rocío Montoro (University of Granada, Spain)
5. Building a World from the Day’s Remains: Showing, Telling, Re-presenting, Jeremy Scott (University of Kent, UK)
Part II. Readers’ Responses to Stylistic Manipulation
6. Manipulating Inferences: Interpretative Problems and their Effects on Readers, Billy Clark (Northumbria University, UK)
7. Readers’ Textual Processing and Emotional Responses to a Story Ending: An Experimental Study of a Short Story by J.D. Salinger, Laura Hidalgo Downing (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)
8. Manipulating Metaphors: Interactions Between Readers and ‘Upon Opening the Chest Freezer’, Sara Whiteley (University of Sheffield, UK)
III. Multimodal and Genre-Specific Manipulation
9. Manipulation in Agatha Christie’s Detective Stories: Rhetorical Control and Cognitive Misdirection in Creating and Solving Crime Puzzles, Catherine Emmott (University of Glasgow, UK) and Marc Alexander (University of Glasgow, UK)
10. Untranslatable Clues: Reader Manipulation and the Challenge of Crime Fiction Translation, Christiana Gregoriou (University of Leeds, UK)
11. Multimodal Manipulation of the Reader in Abrams and Dorst’s S., Nina Nørgaard (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)
Index
Advances in Stylistics provides student resources and research material in cutting-edge stylistics. It forgoes traditional boundaries to encompass the study of both literary and non-literary texts, and covers exciting new developments in the field. It takes a broad view of stylistics as the practice of using linguistic methodologies and analytical frameworks to facilitate the analysis of texts of all genres and types, for the purpose of explaining why we interpret texts in the way that we do.
Books in the series address such topics as stylistic theory, discourse analysis, language and cognition, literary genre, corpus stylistics, the analysis of historical texts, pedagogical stylistics, multimodality and stylistic methodologies.
The series further develops stylistic and linguistic theory, to demonstrate the application and value of stylistic tools of analysis and further consolidate stylistics as a major study and research area within language studies.
Editorial Board
Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK
Beatrix Busse, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Szilvia Csábi, Independent Scholar
Yaxiao Cui, University of Nottingham, UK
Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg, Germany
Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield, UK
Manuel Jobert, Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3, France
Lorenzo Mastropierro, University of Nottingham, UK
Eric Rundquist, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile
Larry Stewart, College of Wooster, USA
Odette Vassallo, University of Malta, Malta
Peter Verdonk, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Chantelle Warner, University of Arizona, USA