Looking at Novels: Typography, Punctuation, & Spelling in Some Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

Looking at Novels: Typography, Punctuation, & Spelling in Some Contemporary Fiction by Francis Leahy Abstract This is a study of the visual appearance of some contemporary novels. The thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism with perspectives derived from linguistics. Novels by Roddy Doyle, Irvine Welsh, Mark Haddon, and David Mitchell, as authors who make particular use of these dimensions of meaning, constitute the main primary source material. This is supplemented by some other works which display particularly revealing or influential usage of the features under discussion. Individual chapters consider typography, punctuation, and spelling, and contain case studies on italics, ellipsis points, and dialect spelling respectively. This thesis argues that novels are fundamentally a printed genre, and because print is a medium which presents language in a visible form, to understand novels it is necessary to consider in particular those dimensions of meaning that are inherent to the medium ? namely, typography, punctuation, and spelling. This means novels must be looked at, not just read.