Contents

• The human capacity for language : The inheritors by William Golding
• Linguistic creativity and limitation : ‘my sweet old etcetera’ by e.e. cummmings
• Sound and meaning : ‘The upper birch-leaves’ by Thomas Hardy
• Making meaning : Susan Sontag’s essay ‘AIDS and its metaphors’ and Eva Salzman’s poem ‘Time out’
• The narrative art of language : poetry by Elizabeth Jennings and the short story ‘Eveline’ from James Joyce’s Dubliners
• Standard and non-standard English : the Dorset poetry of William Barnes, with reference to Tennyson’s Lincolnshire monologues and Tom Leonard’s Glasgow poems
• The language of women and men : ‘Nervous prostration’ by Anna Wickham with particular reference to Jonathan Swift’s ‘The furniture of a woman’s mind’
• The power of discourse : David Lodge’s novel Nice work and poetry by Tom Leonard
• The signalling of meaning : ‘Something for the time being’ by Nadine Gordimer