Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory

This edited volume is the first extensive exploration of the value for literary studies of the model of communication known as relevance theory which stresses the importance of context and inference in the interpretation of communicative acts.

Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow, St John's College, Oxford,Deirdre Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University College London (UCL) and Research Professor in Philosophy, IFIKK, University of Oslo

Terence Cave CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford, Emeritus Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He holds an honorary doctorate at Royal Holloway University of London. and is Chevalier dans l'Ordre National du Mérite (France). He is recognized as a leading specialist in French Renaissance literature, but has also made landmark contributions to comparative literature and the history of poetics. In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500 and subsequently directed the Balzan project 'Literature as an Object of Knowledge' (2010-14). His most recent work focuses on cognitive approaches to literature.

Deirdre Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at UCL and co-director of the Linguistic Agency project at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. Her book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, co-written with Dan Sperber, was described in the London Review of Books as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's' and in Rhetoric Society Quarterly as 'probably the best book you'll ever read on communication.' Translated into twelve languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Malay, Indonesian, and Arabic), it has had a lasting influence in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics and is now regarded as a classic.