International journal of literary linguistics
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This article explores the uses and functions of dialogue in Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. Taking conversational dialogue and fictional dialogue as points of comparison, the article argues that dialogue in autobiographical writing is essentially constructed, albeit not in the same way as fictional dialogue is. Dialogue as a means of dramatisation raises questions regarding factuality and fictionality. In McCourt’s memoir, dialogue is shown to serve numerous functions: characterisation and stereotyping; selfpositioning and indirect stance-marking; the creation of verisimilitude, humour and reader involvement.
This special issue is devoted to a cross-disciplinary investigation of a specific literary phenomenon, fictional dialogue. Fictional dialogue is used to refer to passages of character-character conversation within a literary text. More specifically, the articles of the issue deal with fictional dialogue as a narrative mode in prose fiction. The issue aims to engender an appreciation and a better understanding of the workings of dialogue by drawing on the insights and methods from both literary studies and linguistics. These methods include a rhetorical-ethical approach to narrative, cognitive and “natural” narratology, the study of everyday conversational storytelling, and Conversation Analysis (CA). Combining these methods helps us to understand that while dialogue is a central means to depict character-character relationships it also serves other levels of communication in a narrative and thus contributes to the reader's comprehension of the narrative design's rhetorical and ethical dimensions. The articles also suggest that while understanding dialogue depends partly on the reader’s experiences of real-life conversation, the interpretation of dialogue is determined by the overall design of a literary text and the historically changing conventions.