The Sense of Form in Literature and Language

This text demonstrates how form in language participates in and determines the meaning of literary texts. This entails seeing verse and prose as a structure, of which the building blocks are primarily linguistic and taking the form of these building blocks to be part of the content. The book continues the general line of the research of Michael Shapiro, and exemplifies what a Peircean approach can contribute to the cognitive study of language and literature, and to the exploration of the semiotic nature of verbal creativity. Shapiro analyzes representative texts and examples from Russian, English, Romance, Japanese, and Ancient Greek literature. The analyses of verse and of prose fiction are unified by treating language as the only sure repository of meaning. This work offers a wide range of examples from many genres and traditions and an approach to literature and language deriving in part from a reliance on the semiotic perspective of Peirce's whole philosophy. The book is aimed at departments of literature, language, semiotics, and cultural studies.