| Summary: | This study examines the identity of the concept of literary themes in narratives. It aims to deepen awareness of the nature of themes and to explore the role of lexical sets of semantic fields in recovering them. Chapter One upholds the importance of the notion of themes in literary understandings of texts, surveys difficulties involved in establishing what themes are and aims to establish a provisional understanding of the concept of themes. It examines the thematic literature from a narratological viewpoint, assembling an approach based particularly on work by Prince (1987, 1992), Rimmon-Kenan (1995) and Chatman (1983). Chapter Two focuses on theory concerning the processes of interpreting themes in narratives. Reviewing psycholinguistic literature on possible mental processes involved in identifying themes in narratives, the chapter develops an account of how a reader might process textural themes. Underpinning the account is schema theory and the textual inference-making that it implies. It is argued that reading, processing and distilling themes entails a combination of understanding the text literally and making inferences from it based upon activation of individual schemas. Chapter Three asserts the importance of lexical sets or semantic fields in the process of theme identification. Both the affective and the cognitive aspects of reader response, where textual meaning is achieved as a description of the experience of temporal response (Fish 1980), are implicated in the process of theme recovery. A survey of applied stylistic studies of literary texts suggests that lexis may have a fundamental role in this process. Chapters Four and Five analyse the thematic roles of the colour and sound lexicons in <i>The Mint</i>. Colour terms are found to contribute to four themes in Parts One and Two, two of which are extended and developed in Part Three. Sound terms are found to contribute to a ‘theme of idyllicness’ throughout the text. Chapter Six addresses the rationale for including a second text, <i>Goodbye to All That</i>, for comparison with <i>The Mint.</i> It is argued that there are grounds (Genette 1980, Simpson 1993) for upholding generic similarities between the two texts.
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