Conspicuous silences : implicature and fictionality in the Victorian novel / Ruth Rosaler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosaler, Ruth, author.

Series:

Oxford English monographs

Oxford English Monographs

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Plots (Drama, novel, etc.).

Narration (Rhetoric).

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

viii, 184 pages ; 23 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2016.

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-182) and index.

ISBN:

9780198769743

0198769741

OCLC:

949771036