Inspired by Ruqaiya Hasan’s conviction that, […] in verbal art the role of language is central. Here language is not as clothing to the body; it IS the body.” (1985/1989: 91), the papers are on a wide variety of aspects of the language-literature connection, and approach it from diverse perspectives and methodological frameworks, including Systemic Functional Linguistics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, ethnolinguistics, cultural and translation studies.

A wide range of literary genres and world literatures are analyzed, including Shakespeare’s plays; modern Austrian authors writing in German (e.g., Thomas Bernhard); Perrault’s Histoires et contes du temps passé and their translations by Angela Carter; the Spanish poets of the Generación del ‘50; Malaysian-Singaporean poets in English; Anglo-American Modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound and Lawrence) and novelists (Woolf and Conrad); a short story by Marina Warner and Turkish-German narrative by Feridun Zamoglu; The Gospel of St. John and Harry Potter.

Separate introductions to each of the contributions seek to guide above all the non-specialist reader by describing and comparing the frameworks that the volume comprises. A general introduction diachronically traces key moments in the development of the study of the language of literature seen as socio-cultural practice.

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