Reading is multi-faceted and shaped by contexts, participants, and technologies. Because of its multi-faceted nature, many theories of reading which tackle different perspectives to texts have been proposed. The purpose of this book is to grapple with issues on linguistic and literary theories in reading.

Author Representations in Literary Reading investigates the role of the author in the mind of the reader. It is the first book-length empirical study on generated author inferences by readers of literature. It bridges the gap between theories which hold that the author is irrelevant and those that give him prominence. By combining insights and methods from both cognitive psychology and literary theory, this book contributes to a better understanding of how readers process literary texts and what role their assumptions about an author play. A series of experiments demonstrate that readers generate author inferences during the process of reading, which they use to create an image of the text’s author. The findings suggest that interpretations about the author play a pivotal role in the literary reading process. This book is relevant to scholars and students in all areas of the cognitive sciences, including literary studies and psychology.

Essays discuss realism, futurism, Dada, the grammar of poetry, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Yeats, Turgenev, Pasternak, Blake, and semiotic theory.

Although linguistics is often a technical and increasingly abstruse discipline, many linguists retain a concern for the way in which linguistics can shed light on literature and literary problems. In their introductory chapter, the editors of this collection of essays, by linguists on either side of the Atlantic, enunciate a bold stance that defines the theoretical relationship between linguistics and literature, delimits what should be considered a linguistic analysis of literature, and explains how such an analysis is related to current theories of readership and literary criticism. The editors’ theory of the relationship between linguistic and literary studies stipulates an eclectic rather than a holistic approach, and the essays they have gathered together reflect this belief. The contributions include such varied approaches as transformational grammar, text grammar and speech act theory, and the topics analysed include many that are at the heart of literature, such as topicalization, imagery, figurative language, ambiguity, and the play on words through puns. The anthology as a whole illustrates how linguistic theory illuminates the very nature of literary language. It also gives evidence of the new insights into literature that have arisen from a close analysis of the language in which the literature is encoded.

In this 1992 book, Joseph Graham examines the nature of literary representation.

Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.

These twelve essays treat the thought of "deconstructive" philosophers from the perspective of analytic philosophy and relate the works of such thinkers as Davidson, Quine, and Wittgenstein to the writings of Derrida and de Man.