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.
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).
