Includes bibliographies and index

Acknowledgements; Introduction; PART ONE; 1 A basis for analysis: schema theory, its general principles, history and terminology; Introduction; Schema theory: general principles; Examples demonstrating schemata in discourse processing; Evidence for schemata; World schemata and text schemata; The origins of schema theory; Bartlett's Remembering; The eclipse of schema theory; The revival of schema theory; The terminology of schema theory; Notes; 2 A first bearing: discourse analysis and its limitations; Introduction; 'Text', 'context', and 'discourse'; Acceptability above the sentence; Cohesion; The omission fallacy; Meaning as encoding/decoding versus meaning as construction; Pragmatic approaches and their capacity to characterize 'literariness'; Macro-functions; Discourse structure; Discourse as process (and literature as conversation); Discourse as dialogue; The 'post-scientific' approach; Conclusion; Notes; 3 A second bearing: AI text theory and its limitations; Introduction; The computational and brain paradigms of language; The constructivist principle; One system of conceptual construction: conceptual dependency theory (CD); Problems for conceptual constructions; A complex AI schema theory; Conclusion; Notes; 4 Testing the AI approach. Two analyses: a 'literary' and a 'non-literary' text; Introduction; Text One: the opening of Crime and Punishment (translation); Text Two: 'Every cloud has a Silver Lining' (advertisement); Conclusions from analyses; Notes; 5 A third bearing: literary theories from formalism to stylistics; Introduction; The rise of 'modern literary theory'; Theories of pattern and deviation; The formalist theory of defamiliarization; Patterns in discourse: structures and structuralism; Roman Jakobson's poetics; Conclusion; Notes; 6 Incorporating the reader: two analyses combining stylistics and schema theory; Introduction; Text Three: 'Elizabeth Taylor's Passion' (advertisement); Text Four: 'First World War Poets' (poem);

This study examines the relevance of schema theory to literary theory and the analysis of literary texts. Schema theory suggests that people understand texts and experiences by comparing them with stereotypical mental representations of similar cases.