Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective offers a pragmatic account of the effects achieved by the poetic use of rhetorical tropes and schemes. It contributes to the pragmatics of poetic style by developing work on stylistic effects in relevance theory. It also contributes to literary studies by proposing a new theoretical account of literariness in terms of mental representations and mental processes. The book attempts to define literariness in terms of text-internal linguistic properties, cultural codes or special purpose reading strategies, as well as suggestions that the notion of literariness should be dissolved or rejected. It challenges the accounts of language and verbal communication that underpin such positions and outlines the theory of verbal communication developed within relevance theory that supports an explanatory account of poetic effects and a new account of literariness. This is followed by a broader discussion of philosophical and psychological issues having a bearing on the question of what is expressed non-propositionally in literary communication. The discussion of emotion, qualitative experience and, more specifically, aesthetic experience provides a fuller characterisation of poetic effects and 'poetic thought'.

This book provides a detailed example of an eye-tracking method for comparing the reading experience of a literary source text readers with readers of a translation at stylistically marked points. Drawing on principles, methods and inspiration from fields including translation studies, cognitive psychology, and language and literary studies, the author proposes an empirical method to investigate the notion of stylistic foregrounding, with 'style' understood as the distinctive manner of expression in a particular text. The book employs Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro (1959) and its English translation Zazie in the Metro (1960) as a case study to demonstrate the proposed methods. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation studies, as well as those interested in literary reception, stylistics and related fields.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

"Chapter 1 begins with a well-known biblical poem, Psalm 23, in order to illustrate two problems facing biblical poetry readers: what are "lines" in (traditionally unlineated) biblical poetry, and why does it even matter? The chapter sets these overarching problems in the context of modern biblical poetry scholarship: the frameworks of parallelism and meter, and the confusion over whether "biblical poetry" is best defined by style or structure. While parallelism and meter are rejected, Robert Lowth's early observation of "conformation" is affirmed: biblical poetry does relate to structure, and it is built from lines that fit to each other, not lines that fit to a meter. This raises the question of how the free-rhythm (unlineated) lines of biblical poetry can be perceived or mentally organized as structural-rhythmic units by the listener or reader. A cognitive approach informed by the theory and method of Reuven Tsur is introduced as the solution"--

First-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studies—including the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic "I-voice." In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part by the "New Lyric Studies," I, the Poet will appeal not only to scholars of Latin literature but to readers across a range of literary studies who seek to understand the Roman contexts which shaped canonical poetic genres.

It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry’s audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry’s ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry’s surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry’s still evolving place in American culture.