This volume is a study of the language of literary texts. It looks at the usefulness of pragmatic theories to the interpretation of literary texts and surveys methods of analysing narrative, with special attention given to narratorial authority and character focalisation. The book includes a description of Grice's Co-operative Principle and its contribution to the interpretation of literary texts, and considers Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, with particular stress on the valuable insights into irony and varieties of indirect discourse it offers. Bakhtin's theories are introduced, and...