The relevance of 'Relevance' to literary understanding was clear from Sperber and Wilson's inauguration of the concept. After literary theory's long wanderings in the wilderness, it brought literary studies back to the conditions of everyday life and thought. Its claims have since been strengthened by interaction with cognitive science and a three-year Balzan research programme. As a sequel, the present essay collection shows how subtly the central idea has been
developed and how fruitfully it can be applied to a wide range of texts and genres.
Terence Cave CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford, Emeritus Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He holds an honorary doctorate at Royal Holloway University of London. and is Chevalier dans l'Ordre National du Mérite (France). He is recognized as a leading specialist in French Renaissance literature, but has also made landmark contributions to comparative
literature and the history of poetics. In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500 and subsequently directed the Balzan project 'Literature as an Object of Knowledge' (2010-14). His most recent work focuses on cognitive approaches to literature.
Deirdre Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at UCL and co-director of the Linguistic Agency project at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. Her book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, co-written with Dan Sperber, was described in the London Review of Books as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's' and in Rhetoric Society Quarterly as 'probably the best book you'll
ever read on communication.' Translated into twelve languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Malay, Indonesian, and Arabic), it has had a lasting influence in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics and is now regarded as a classic.