Silence and Silences. A Pragmatic Approach to Alice Thompson Meynell's Poetic Language

The study of silence in pragmatics is a relatively recent phenomenon. It started to gain scholarly attention in the 1970s, but only in the 1990s the contributions to this topic began to multiply. The purpose of this volume is to analyse the use of language in Alice Thompson Meynell’s poetry by applying the tools offered primarily by pragmatics, in order to achieve a hypothesis of interpretation of her recurrence to silence. Alice Thompson Meynell (1847-1922), though very well-known in the London cultural and literary world of her lifetime, went through a long period of oblivion, which was interrupted by the operation of re-discovery of Victorian women poets initiated by Women’s Studies in the 1970s. The first section is focused on Meynell as a public and literary figure, her relationship with the poetic tradition, and on how her literary production was received both in her lifetime and after her death. To this aim, all the most relevant contributions are taken into account, from those written by friends and acquaintances to the most recent ones. The second section is devoted to theory and analysis. After synthesising the foundations of pragmatics and offering an overview of the main contributions to the study of silence, an attempt is made to create a taxonomy of Meynell’s use of silence by analysing a choice of her poems. The analysis is conducted by making reference to Jaworski’s interpretation of RT as applied to silence and to Khatchadourian’s concept of “silent doing” - and of the five related stages in silent communication.