Finding Elizabeth: Construing Memory in Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 27803973
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1515/jls-2017-0008
- Title of journal
- Journal of Literary Semantics
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 131
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 1613-3838
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research uses cognitive linguistic theory to engage with current concerns around the representation and experience of dementia, and uses as its case study the 2014 novel Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey. The novel is a genre hybrid of crime, psychological and literary fiction centred on a protagonist with dementia, Maud, who is extremely unreliable and often forgets facts and events even as they are unfolding around her. This is offset by sharply remembered events from the past, which in turn leads to a discordant narrative that alternates between the vague and the specific
In order to investigate this contrast, this article argues that a stylistic account of Cognitive Grammar can shed further light on how Maud’s cognitive habits are represented in the novel, and how these in turn impact upon text-world representation. The analysis draws upon Cognitive Grammar’s construal processes, in particular, to explore the fictive illustration of mind style–and of memory–in this literary context. The article considers how one of the particular experiences of reading the narrative is dependent on the “layered construal” prevalent in the text, whereby a reader’s experience of the fictional world is continually contrasted with that of the narrator. This article has been influential in stylistic research in the representation of unreliable narration in contemporary fiction, and has been cited in the journals Language and Literature, Literary Semantics, Style, and Narrative Inquiry.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -