Conspicuous silences : implicature and fictionality in the Victorian novel /
How are a reader's perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation through textual clues rather than explicit narration, and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? 'Conspicuous Silences' answers these questions by examining Victorian novels in whi...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford, United Kingdom :
Oxford University Press,
2016.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Series: | Oxford English monographs.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | How are a reader's perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation through textual clues rather than explicit narration, and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? 'Conspicuous Silences' answers these questions by examining Victorian novels in which pivotal events are left inexplicit for hundreds of pages at a time, but are nonetheless evident to the reader. The clarity with which readers understand these inexplicit plot lines is evidenced by their ability to follow the progression of narratives that rely heavily on the inexplicit content being detected; without this reader comprehension, these narratives would be deemed incoherent. In linguistics, communications that depend on a hearer's or reader's inference, rather on their 'decoding' the explicit content of an utterance, are termed 'implicatures'. 'Conspicuous Silences' explores the impact that central, sustained implicatures have on a reader's experience of a novel. It also discusses how authors may generate those implicatures by exploiting the reader's assumption of narratorial omniscience, and the correlated reader assumption of a narrative's fictionality.-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (viii, 184 pages .) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-182) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191822582 0191822582 0191082368 9780191082368 9780191082375 0191082376 |