ABSTRACT
When the recent history of the human sciences comes to be written, the 1960s will be known as the decade of theory and the 1970s as that of anti-theory. In literary studies, this history will have to record how narrative has become what the lyric was for the New Criticism: the embodiment of the prevailing conception of the literary and, as such, the site for the testing of the very possibility of a literary theory. In that it attempts a theory of the language of narrative fiction, the present book is, then, an anachronism. But it is only in the context of both these past two decades that its genesis and goals can be under stood, and such an historical account forms the natural prologue to and justification for its linguistic approach to literary problems.
