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Pronouns in Literature

Positions and Perspectives in Language

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  • © 2018

Overview

Editors:
  1. Alison Gibbons

    1. Department of Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom

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  2. Andrea Macrae

    1. Department of English Literature and Modern Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Explores the complex functioning of pronouns as part of the linguistic nuances of perspectives and positioning in literary texts
  • Advances current scholarship on narrative voices and articulations of perspective
  • Draws out underlying themes including reader engagement, the plurality of voices and worlds, metafictionality, ambiguity and unreliability, the problematisation of subjectivity and the ethical implications of subjective relationships

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xix
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  2. Positions and Perspectives on Pronouns in Literature: The State of the Subject

    • Alison Gibbons, Andrea Macrae
    Pages 1-14

  3. “I Am Thy Father’s Spirit”: The First-Person Pronoun and the Rhetoric of Identity in Hamlet

    • Katie Wales
    Pages 15-31

  4. “We Have Tomorrow Bright Before Us Like a Flame”: Pronouns, Enactors, and Cross-Writing in The Dream Keeper and Other Poems

    • Marcello Giovanelli
    Pages 33-53

  5. Positioning the Reader in Post-Apartheid Literature of Trauma: I and You in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story

    • Andrea Macrae
    Pages 55-74

  6. Autonarration, I, and Odd Address in Ben Lerner’s Autofictional Novel 10:04

    • Alison Gibbons
    Pages 75-96

  7. Placements and Functions of Brief Second-Person Passages in Fiction

    • Joshua Parker
    Pages 97-112

  8. On the Interpretive Effects of Double Perspective in Genitive Constructions

    • Helen de Hoop, Kim Schreurs
    Pages 113-130

  9. They-Narratives

    • Jan Alber
    Pages 131-150

  10. The Observing We in Literary Representations of Neglect and Social Alienation: Types of Narrator Involvement in Janice Galloway’s ‘Scenes from the Life No. 26: The Community and the Senior Citizen’ and Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs

    • Catherine Emmott
    Pages 151-169

  11. Let Us Tell You Our Story: We-Narration and Its Pronominal Peculiarities

    • Monika Fludernik
    Pages 171-192

  12. Multi-Teller and Multi-Voiced Stories: The Poetics and Politics of Pronouns

    • Marina Grishakova
    Pages 193-215

  13. Pronouns in Literary Fiction as Inventive Discourse

    • Henrik Skov Nielsen
    Pages 217-234

  14. Postscript: Unusual Voices and Multiple Identities

    • Brian Richardson
    Pages 235-244

  15. Back Matter

    Pages 245-279
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Keywords

About this book

This edited collection brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who together offer cutting-edge insights into the complex roles, functions, and effects of pronouns in literary texts. The book engages with a range of text-types, including poetry, drama, and prose from different periods and regions, in English and in translation. Beginning with analyses of the first-person pronoun, it moves onto studies of the subject dynamics of first- and second-person, before considering plural modes of narration and how pronoun use can help to disperse narrative perspective. The volume then debates the functional constraints of pronouns in fictional contexts and finally reflects upon the theoretical advancements presented in the collection. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, stylistics and cognitive poetics, narratology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology and literary criticism.

Reviews

“when going through Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language, readers will find themselves on a magical tour of communicating with characters and narrators in literary texts of different times and regions. Due to the unique character and the flexible facet of pronouns in literature, this innovative volume will definitely appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, theoretical and applied linguistics, stylistics and cognitive poetics, psychology, narratology and literary criticism.” (Yanli Jia, Language and Literature, August, 2018)

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Alison Gibbons

  • Department of English Literature and Modern Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Andrea Macrae

About the editors

Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (2012), co-author of Contemporary Stylistics: Language, Interpretation, Cognition (2018), and co-editor of Mark Z. Danielewski (2011), Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012), and Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (2017).


Andrea Macrae is Senior Lecturer in Stylistics at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She specialises in deixis and has published work on pronouns in the Journal of Literary Semantics (2010), the journal Diegesis (2016), and in The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns (2015) and Texts and Minds (2012). 

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Pronouns in Literature

  • Book Subtitle: Positions and Perspectives in Language

  • Editors: Alison Gibbons, Andrea Macrae

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95316-5Published: 23 January 2018

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95794-1Published: 07 June 2019

  • eBook ISBN: 978-1-349-95317-2Published: 04 January 2018

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIX, 279

  • Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Language and Literature, Discourse Analysis, Stylistics, Literary Theory, Creative Writing, Grammar

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