First published in 1982, this title grew from a series of essays on various aspects of narrative style; the result is a finished product that melds literary theory with linguistic methodology. It is argued that, where linguistic theory intersects with literary theory, it is narrative that provides the crucial ‘experiment’ for deciding between a communication and a non-communication theory of language and, by extension, of literature. Chapters discuss such areas as subjectivity in direct and indirect speech, the absence of the narrator, and the development of narrative style. With a detailed introduction to the subject, this reissue will be of value to students of linguistics and literature with a particular interest in narrative style and linguistic theory.

'Time travels in divers paces with divers people.' Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line contains a hidden ambiguity: not only do individual people experience time differently, but time travels in diverse paces when we are with diverse persons. The line articulates a contemporary understanding of subjective time: it is changed by interaction with our social environment. Interacting with other people—and even literary characters—can slow or quicken the experience of time. Interactive time, and the paradigm of enactive cognition in which it sits, calls for an expansion of traditional ideas of time in narrative. The first book-length study of interactive time in narrative, Catching Time explains how lived time and narrative time interpenetrate each other, so that the relational model of subjective time acts as a narrative function. Catching Time develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework, drawing on cognitive science, narratology, and linguistics, to understand the patterns of temporality that shape narrative.

Optional-Narrator Theory makes a strong intervention in (or against) narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives.

The narrator (the answer to the question “who speaks in the text?”) is a commonly used notion in teaching literature and in literary criticism, even though it is the object of an ongoing debate in narrative theory. Do all fictional narratives have a narrator, or only some of them? Can narratives thus be “narratorless”? This question divides communicational theories (based on the communication between real or fictional narrator and narratee) and noncommunicational or poetic theories (which aim to rehabilitate the function of the author as the creator of the fictional narrative). Clarifying the notion of the narrator requires a historical and epistemological approach focused on the opposition between communicational theories of narrative in general and noncommunicational or poetic theories of the fictional narrative in particular. The Narrator offers an original and critical synthesis of the problem of the narrator in the work of narratologists and other theoreticians of narrative communication from the French, Czech, German, and American traditions and in representations of the noncommunicational theories of fictional narrative. Sylvie Patron provides linguistic and pragmatic tools for interrogating the concept of the narrator based on the idea that fictional narrative has the power to signal, by specific linguistic marks, that the reader must construct a narrator; when these marks are missing, the reader is able to perceive other forms and other narrative effects, specially sought after by certain authors.

The seven essays gathered in this volume are all concerned, more or less directly, with the “unspeakable sentences” of fictional narration, that is, the sentences that do not bear any explicit mark nor any implicit indication of a first person and which are not interpretable as the expression of a speaker’s subjectivity. Chief among them are the sentences of free indirect style, which this book prefers to call sentences of “represented speech and thought.” All of these essays were written after the publication of Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (1982). They take up its theoretical frameworks and extend its analyses into other contexts, where they acquire other uses, other functions, and other values. Taken as a whole, this work bears witness to the richness and vitality of the encounter between linguistics, philosophy, and the theory and analysis of narrative and the novel.

This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.