Amazon.com description: Product Description: Up until the mid-1980s most pragmatic analysis had been done on spoken language use, considerably less on written use, and very little at all on literary activity. This has now radically changed. "Pragmatics" could be informally defined as the study of relationships between language and its users. This volume seeks to reposition the literary text at the centre of that study. The internationally renowned contributors draw together two main streams. On the one hand, there are concerns which are close to the syntax and semantics of mainstream linguistics, and on the other, there are concerns ranging towards anthropological linguistics, socio and psycholinguistics. "Literary pragmatics" represents an antidote to the fragmenting specialization so characteristic of the humanities in the 20th century.