Synopsis
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.
About the Authors
Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at University Paul Valéry of Montpellier 3, France.
Daniel McIntyre is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Brian Walker is a Visiting Researcher at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His research interests are in stylistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics, especially applied to literary and political discourses. He has co-authored books on discourse analysis (Canning and Walker 2024), stylistics (Lugea and Walker 2023), corpus stylistics (McIntyre and Walker 2019) and socio-political keywords (Jeffries and Walker 2017). His other published research focuses on using corpus linguistic approaches to analyse poetry (McIntyre and Walker 2022), discourses of austerity (Jeffries and Walker 2019, 2020), and Early Modern English news pamphlets (Walker and McIntyre 2015).
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.