Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

Three areas of linguistics are currently being developed which help us understand the constructive nature of discourse in representation. First, there is an approach drawing on cognitive psychology and cognitive semantics which seeks to explain the building of a textual world, an intersubjective structure of concepts and relationships, in terms of ‘schemata’ (‘frames’, ‘scripts’, ‘prototypes’, etc.) which are fields of knowledge shared by producers and consumers of texts and which are made accessible to the reader through linguistic cues (de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981, chap. 5). Second, related to the analysis of schemata is the study of ‘inferencing’: the interpretation of texts in terms of world-knowledge, systems of beliefs about the world (Downes, 1984, chap. 9; Brown and Yule, 1983). Third, functional linguistics (Halliday, 1985) provides analytic tools for studying how the perspective from which a textual world is regarded is shaped by linguistic choices in what Halliday calls the ‘ideational’ function of language (see Halliday, 1971, 1978; Fowler, 1977, 1986 on ‘mind-style’).

Since classical times, it has been held that ‘Literature’ is a form of discourse which has a special and important relationship with the world, although the nature of that relationship has shifted in different periods of theory. ‘Mimetic’ theories foreground the notion of ‘imitation’ of a world, and seem to presuppose a belief in an already existing world. Such a belief is overt only rarely, for example in defence of documentary or naturalist preferences in the novel. More generally, theorists and critics have tended to interpret mimesis as a constructive process in which an appearance of reality is created or a universal interpretation of reality is formed.

The apparently short-lived and constantly defensive sentimental movement thereby achieved something that classical ethics was failing to do and which Romanticism had no intention of doing—the emotional and intellectual foundation for recognizably modern social relationships. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was apparent to many that these relationships could no longer realistically be based upon patriarchal hegemony or traditional communal sanctions, but few were as yet prepared to entertain the concept of a social system founded upon the acquisitive individual ego—a veritable market-place of desires and values. The ethic of sensibility bridged the paradigmatic gap by advocating more flexible, humane and polite kinds of human interaction.

When the ancient Greek historian Herodotus visited Thebes in Egypt, he gazed with awe at the list of High Priests of the temple inscribed on its walls as he realized that the three hundred generations represented there took him back thousands of years before the dawn of Greek history and civilization. In The Death of the Past (1969, p. 111) J.H. Plumb contrasts this disturbing experience that began to give meaning and shape to the Greek sense of history with the Chinese chroniclers, for whom the succession of one emperor after another for over five thousand years, however violent the dynastic clashes, was essentially unproblematic in that it was a record of a single continuous society.

Publishing is the commercial channel through which books travel from author to reader. Between the invention of printing and the industrial revolution, the book trade underwent slow transformation rather than rapid change, and indeed many of its most characteristic features were substantially unchanged. The publishers themselves—the copy-owning booksellers—were in business to make a profit, not to serve the cultural development of society. They developed mechanisms of supply and distribution which enabled them to do so. They participated in the evolution of trade practices and indeed laws which protected their investments in the rights to publish particular books. They concentrated on books which made profits, and although they would follow fashions they would rarely lead them. Few of the books they published are remembered even by name, and fewer still are read. We may treasure those few as part of our heritage, but we should never forget the many hundreds of forgotten novels, thousands of forgotten histories, tens of thousands of forgotten sermons, and as many again of books on every subject under the sun, which provided the profits which sustained the book trade.