Lund Studies in English – serie

This collection brings together diverse approaches to the phenomena of subjectivity and epistemicity in language. The studies originate from three fundamentally different perspectives: literary studies, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. Despite the differences in these approaches, the studies are all unified by their text-based methodology and a desire to understand how language can be used to express subjectivity and the subject’s knowledge and beliefs. The volume has been brought together with the express aim of giving scientists and scholars working on these problems access to distinct yet compatible approaches. It constitutes a valuable collection of text-based research for anyone working on stance taking, epistemic predication or the notion of linguistic subjectivity.

Writing is a central activity at university. Writing in English at University: A Guide for Second Language Writers is a textbook designed to accompany the MOOC Writing in English at University. This book can also be used as a stand-alone handbook, with links to online resources, such as instructional videos on key aspects of academic writing, being provided throughout. This textbook, just like the MOOC, targets university students currently involved in writing assignments or degree projects, as well as anyone wishing to learn more about academic writing in English. Although aimed to provide guidance and useful tips and tricks to all students and writers, it has been developed specifically with learners in mind who are writing essays and research papers in second-language environments and whose native language is not English. Writing in English at University: A Guide for Second Language Writers covers central aspects of academic writing in English with a specific focus on: • common terms and concepts that all writers need to be aware of • ways of organising and structuring a text • how to read and make use of sources and previous research • practical advice on issues that especially second-language writers encounter when working on their texts The MOOC Writing in English at University and this textbook were developed at the English Unit, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University.

In August 2007, about 200 senior researchers in the field of English, language and literature, spent a week in Lund taking the temperature of their subject. Nearly 150 papers were presented in 19 conference sections. This volume contains a lively selection, chosen by the 37 Section Chairs as saying something about where research in the discipline is heading. Also included are the two plenary lectures about the state and future of English in the academy by Elizabeth Traugott (language) and Helen Vendler (literature).A common feature unites this diverse collection: English literature and language as a vital concern for real people, all over the world and in the past as well as the present. Here ‘English’ reaffirms its human credentials, moving forward with fresh confidence and enthusiasm.

Time and again in George Eliot’s novels, from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda, the narrator speaks directly to the reader. Ranging from quiet presumptions of assent (‘it is well known that...’) to downright admonitions (‘[i]f you think it is incredible… I will ask you to use your power of comparison a little more effectively’), these narratorial comments condition the reader’s response to the text in a variety of ways. This book invites its own reader into a multifaceted exploration of the intriguing processes by which readers’ interpretations are shaped by narratorial commentary in Eliot’s fiction. Introducing a new pair of narratological concepts, ‘story-time now’ and narration now’, it elucidates the interplay between narrator and reader, creating fresh awareness of the subtleties of Eliot’s craft.

"‘I am a man More sinn’d against than sinning’ For centuries, readers and spectators have felt invited to sympathize with the father in one of William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, King Lear. Towards the end of the 20th century, however, these sympathies shifted towards Lear’s daughters in both the critical and the creative afterlife of the play. This book examines the ways in which three modern appropriations of King Lear – A Thousand Acres (1991) by Jane Smiley, Ladder of Years (1995) by Anne Tyler, and Cat’s Eye (1988) by Margaret Atwood – suspend the reader’s inclination to assign blame to Goneril and Regan, transferring a measure of responsibility back on to the father. It demonstrates that literary appropriation is able to alter the reader’s understanding of a major work of literature and even engender ethical effects in its readers."

This book presents a theoretical discussion of the creation of meaning in language, with special focus on the functions that adjectives fulfil in this process. The discussion rests on a dynamic view of meaning and interpretation, according to which there are no fixed linguistic meanings – not even for single lexemes. Instead of symbolising meaning in a more or less static and ‘eternal’ fashion, linguistic items are assumed to effect the creation of meaning, and to shape meaning dynamically in the particular communicative event at hand, from some kind of underlying meaning potential.The aim of the book is twofold: on the one hand, to outline a tentative theory of meaning creation and interpretive function in general; on the other hand, to present a theoretical discussion of adjective functions in particular, with the ultimate goal of providing a general framework from which more specific models for in-depth empirical research can be obtained.

How do you represent thoughts, feelings, and experiences for which words do not suffice? This question lies behind many of the experiments that characterize modernist fiction. Silent Modernism: Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf examines one of the solutions to the problem of representing the unrepresentable: letting silence speak instead of words. By closely examining the form and function of silence in the works of three central modernists – Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf – this award-winning study argues that silence is part of a modernist aesthetics that emphasizes suggestion rather than precision. Through silence, these three writers not only draw their readers’ attention to difficulties concerning literary representation but also suggest the very content they cannot properly represent. Silence in the modernist novel is thus not an absence but an expression in its own right – and an essential aspect of modernist realism.