Literary Meaning

"In this clearly written and accessible book, (Wendell) Harris sets out to expose the inadequacies of current methods and trends in literary criticism. . . . The book's greatest strength is its lucid presentation of critical works, which are then shown to be compromised by fallacies and flaws".-- CHOICE.

This volume studies how the literary elements in the Qur'an function in conveying its religious message effectively. It is divided into three parts. Part one includes studies of the whole Qur'an or large segments of it belonging to one historical period of its revelation; these studies concentrate on the analysis of its language, its style, its structural composition, its aesthetic characteristics, its rhetorical devices, its imagery, and the impact of these elements and their significance. Part two includes studies on individual suras of the Qur'an, each of which focuses on the sura's literary elements and how they produce meaning; each also explores the structure of this meaning and the coherence of its effect. Part three includes studies on Muslim appreciations of the literary aspects of the Qur'an in past generations and shows how modern linguistic, semantic, semiotic, and literary scholarship can add to their contributions.

This text examines the literary elements in the Qur'an and analyses how they function in conveying its religious message effectively.

Professor Robson considers particular works and authors in the light of the preceding discussion of critical principles.

There is a marked awareness about the language of literature and its meaning both in Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. The aestheticians of both schools hold that the language of literature embodies a significant aspect of human experience, and represents a creative pattern of verbal structure to impart meaning effectively. Modern Western aesthetic thinking, which includes theories like formalism, new criticism, stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, discourse analysis, semiotics and dialogic criticism, in one way or another emphasizes the study of the language of literature in order to understand its meaning. Similarly, there is a distinct focus on the language of literature and its meaning in Indian literary theories which include the theory of rasa (aesthetic experience), alaṁkāra (the poetic figure), rīti (diction), dhvani (suggestion), vakrokti (oblique expression) and aucitya (propriety). This book explores how the language of literature and its meaning have been dealt with in both Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. In doing so, the study concentrates on Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti and Ānandavardhana’s theory of dhvani in Indian aesthetic thinking and Russian formalism and deconstruction in Western thinking. The book categorically focuses on the intersection between the theory of vakrokti and Russian formalism and the meeting-point between the theory of dhvani and deconstruction.

The essays in this two-volume anthology provide the reader with an overview of current Czech, Polish and Hungarian research in language, literature and meaning as well as some new perspectives on the major theoretical contributions of Roman Ingarden, Georg Lukács and Jan Mukarovský. For the most part, the emphasis is on Poetics and Literary Theory; however, in some of the essays the focus shifts to such related disciplines as Aesthetics, Linguistics and Semiotics. The heterogeneity of this collection reflects the broad spectrum of interests and approaches to problems of theory being pursued at present in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Much of the work being done in these countries remains relatively unknown outside of Eastern Europe. This anthology is an attempt to rectify this situation and make better known the nature and extent of research which promises new insights into a whole range of phenomena in language, literature and culture.

First published in 2000, this volume is a unique collection of essays which draws our attention to the importance of those textual elements traditionally ignored in literary criticism. These include punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, typography, cover design, white space and marginalia; features which significantly affect the meaning of a literary text. The first section of the book opens with a proposal for a new theory of punctuation. The essays which follow are devoted to detailed interpretations of particular marks in the work of individual writers, including Spenser, Richardson and George Eliot. The consequences of this approach to the literary text are examined in the second section of the book, which begins with a debate on editorial practice and responsibility, and features insights from editors. Attention is drawn in particular to the special issues thrown up by dramatic texts, translations and electronic editions. The relationship of marks to the main text is far from subordinate, and we cannot appreciate the full interpretative potential of a text without considering this. The essays here compel us to assess the interaction of textual and literary meaning. To mark a text is to make it.

In this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on literary, political, and philosophical texts from Central and Western Europe, Reiss maintains that by the early eighteenth century divergent views concerning gender, politics, science, taste, and the role of the writer had consolidated, and literature came to be regarded as an embodiment of universal values. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Reiss asserts, conceptual consensus was breaking down, and many Western Europeans found themselves overwhelmed by a sense of social decay. A key element of this feeling of catastrophe, Reiss points out, was the assumption that thought and letters could not affect worldly reality. Demonstrating that a political discourse replaced the no-longer-viable discourse of theology, he looks closely at the functions that letters served in the reestablishment of order. He traces the development of the idea of literature in texts by Montaigne, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, among others; through seventeenth-century writings by such authors as Davenant, Boileau, Dryden, Rymer, Anne Dacier, Astell, and Leibniz; to eighteenth-century works including those of Addison, Pope, Batteux and Hutcheson, Burke, Lessing, Kant, and Wollstonecraft. Reiss follows key strands of the tradition, particularly the concept of the sublime, into the nineteenth century through a reading of Hegel's Aesthetics. The Meaning of Literature will contribute to current debates concerning cultural dominance and multiculturalism. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in literature and in cultural studies, including literary theorists and historians, comparatists, intellectual historians, historical sociologists, and philosophers.