The Pragmatics of Revision

It is rare to find academic writing that is as engaging as Siobhan Chapman's new book. This is the clearest account of Gricean and neo-Gricean implicature that I have read and has as much to say to experts in these areas as it does to beginners. This is a major contribution to pragmatics and stylistics specifically and to language and literary studies generally, and will undoubtedly become the standard work on literary rewriting. --Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield, UKThis is a sustained and detailed analysis of Moore's aesthetic practice of revision that will be of interest to both literary scholars and researchers in stylistics, but also to anyone engaged in the process of creative writing. --Andrew Caink, University of Westminster, UKThis book presents the first full-length study of the stylistically experimental and influential novelist George Moore's (1852-1933) repeated acts of rewriting. Moore extensively and repeatedly revised and re-issued many of his major works, sometimes years or even decades after they were initially published. This monograph provides new insights into how this process shaped and determined his work, and by extension into the creative significance of literary rewriting more generally. It also offers the first sustained application of linguistic pragmatics, the study of meaning in interaction, to the work of a single author, opening up questions about how analytical paradigms developed in pragmatics can explain how rewriting can affect the interactive relationship between a literary text and its readers. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the areas of pragmatics, stylistics, literary history, English literature and Irish literature.Siobhan Chapman is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, UK.