The Pragmatics of Fiction is a pragmatics textbook devoted to the study of fictional texts—understood broadly as the novel, poetry, fictional dialogues in films and TV series, and drama—using pragmatic tools and theories. Locher and Jucker’s book addresses “fictional texts as cultural artefacts in their own right” (224) rather than mere artificial depositories of linguistic data for pragmaticists. Rich in theoretical pragmatic approaches, this study explains them based on the examples of, among others, plays, novels, films, comic books, and advertisements, thus following recent scholarly trends of accepting fictional language as a reliable source of data for linguistic investigations and using pragmatics as a methodological tool for analyzing fiction (see Black; Chapman and Clark; Locher and Jucker; Wilson). It draws attention to the fact that fictional communication, much as it mimetically reflects human communication, is special because it involves the “fictional contract” or “a silent agreement between the author and the readers or viewers about the level of veracity that can be expected in a novel, a movie or another piece of fiction” (33). In this way, fictional communication often requires more sophisticated and adapted pragmatic models for its analysis.The book consists of three parts. Part One looks at fiction as a valuable data resource for pragmatic theorizing and explains why there is such a vague boundary between fictional and nonfictional uses of language. Part Two explores the participation structure of literary communication and focuses on the creation of the story worlds in fiction and on fictional characterization, narration, and plot structure. Part Three discusses various functions of dialogue in fiction and the orality features, which differ from the ones in human communication. It also investigates how societal ideologies (impoliteness, gender norms) imbue fictional texts and how fictional texts can produce real emotions in the audience. I used this textbook with my students of year 3 BA in a stylistics course (specialization: English Studies in Literature and Culture), so this review is our joint effort and an effect of real classroom interaction.Chapter One establishes some basic definitions regarding literary communication (extradiegetic vs. intradiegetic communication) and its links with pragmatic communication. The authors divide all fiction into written fiction, performed fiction (theatre, cinema), and spontaneously created fiction (improv theater, daydreaming, fantasy worlds in children’s play), focusing mostly on the first two categories in further chapters. They acknowledge the fact that literature has always enjoyed a special status in linguistic research but they also note that there were times when literary data was not considered reliable for the linguists’ endeavors. Much as in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries literary works were considered to provide examples of good language usage to be included in dictionaries and grammar books, later on, fictional texts were rejected by linguists because they started to be perceived as “artificial and contrived and, therefore, unsuitable” (10)—the literary language seemed far removed from the actual everyday communication they were interested in. However, in the course of the twentieth century historical linguists in particular revived the interest in literary discourse as a database for their research.Chapter Two discusses the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Locher and Jucker refer to Searle and his understanding of fictional utterances as “non-serious” speech acts since they do not have the same illocutionary force as the utterances spoken in a real-life context. In fiction (the novel), the author is not committed to the truth of their sentences unlike in nonfictional genres (newspaper articles) where the author can be held accountable for the truth of their assertions. They claim after Searle that there is no strict division between the literary and nonliterary and that the classification of a given text as literature or non-literature is a value judgment reserved to the reader. They propose their own pragmatic model of fiction (genres plotted according to levels of fictitiousness, or veracity of characters and events, and reader/viewer expectations concerning fictionality), which has been inspired by the reception-based theories (23). According to this model, newspaper reports and documentaries are nonfictional and they allege factuality by depicting faithful accounts of the world we live in as well as real people and events existing in this world. The novel, for example, goes much higher up the vertical axis of fictitiousness and further right on the horizontal axis of fictionality because it presents realistic worlds (story worlds modeled on the real world) with fictional characters, readers being aware that is a figment of the writer’s imagination. Locher and Jucker underline the fact that the fictional contract concentrates on the author–reader interaction and is thus “fundamentally pragmatic in nature” (21).Chapter Three looks at communication in fiction and argues that it is not very different from everyday communication because in both types of communication we can distinguish between different roles of the producers and the recipients of a communicative act. There are different layers of the audience in everyday communication, depending on their status of being directly addressed and ratified, or known by the speaker to be present or concealed. Since the nature of fictional communication is more complex in this respect, the authors distinguish between “addressee recipients” and “meta recipients” as the audience who is both addressed directly and ratified by the speaker; “incidental recipients” who are known to be there and for whom extra information may be provided; and “accidental recipients” who should not even be there because the message was not suitable for them (44). Additionally, the chapter elaborates on the levels of fictional communication, specifying an “intradiegetic level” as the communication between the characters in the story world and the “extradiegetic level” as the communication between the author (text) and the reader. There is an extra level for performed fiction (film, TV series), the “supradiegetic level” (53), which includes the studio audience (fake or real), which reacts to a given scene with laughter. The discussion of communication levels in performed fiction is backed up by examples of TV series, such as How I met Your Mother (2005–13) or House MD (2004–11).Chapter Four offers an interesting discussion of literary genres (lyrical poetry, drama, and epic) and how our traditional understanding of fictional genres was changed by modern streaming platforms. In class, we talked about Netflix proposing over two hundred genre categories of films, shows, and TV series and how this new categorization influences the students’ perception of genres. Our discussion seamlessly linked with “frames” (Goffman)—structures of expectations based on background knowledge, which people activate in particular situations or contexts (restaurant frame, university frame). The students explained how they select books to read or films to watch based on their expectations regarding book covers, film posters, blurbs, and trailers, and how they are encouraged or discouraged from reading and watching something when a given production violates their frames. From a course instructor’s perspective, I can say that this chapter provides many useful ideas on how to run a lively discussion about fictional genres, which students often find to be a boring topic. Each chapter in this book includes exercises that can be done in class or assigned as homework, which were of great help to me while structuring my stylistics course.Chapter Five looks at stories as fundamental meaning-making discourse units and it offers some vital narratological definitions, such as “intertextuality” (87), “homodiegetic” and “heterodiegetic narrative” (92), or “focalisation” (93)—nothing new to students of literary theory but certainly something new to the students of linguistics. It evokes Labov’s core elements of narratives of personal experience and underlines how speakers in real life and authors in fiction alike can negotiate their “selves” through storytelling (students noted that each of them could tell the same story “how I fell off a bike” in a different way and said that how one tells a story can say a lot about one’s personality). This chapter was appreciated by one of my students, Matylda:Chapter Six discusses character creation and focuses on multimodal cues in fictional identity construction. Following Culpeper, it enumerates all: explicit, implicit, and authorial cues in a table (102), which was very convenient for our exercises in class. As a way of demonstration, Locher and Jucker apply the cues in their analysis of the film The Big Lebowski (1989). I asked my students to identify the implicit cues displayed by the protagonist of the Netflix mini-series Inventing Anna (2022), which tells the story of Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), an Instagram con artist, who tricked the New York elites by pretending to be a German heiress. After watching a fragment and following the script, my students isolated specific multimodal cues characterizing Anna, for example, speaking English with a foreign accent, paralinguistic features (irritating giggling or unemotional, even voice pitch), controlling the topic, which, they argued, made her seem attractive and self-confident to the people she stole money from. The second part of the chapter is devoted to linguistic variation and the function of idiolect, dialect, ethnolect, and sociolect in character creation. The authors use a funny example of an ad promoting a language school, which shows a German coastguard newbie having difficulties understanding a ship captain speaking English over the radio—“we are sinking, we’re sinking . . .”—“What are you sinking about?” The clip stresses the fact that lacking foreign language skills can jeopardize lives and that this particular language school can help the audience improve theirs. Sadly, my students did not remember this famous advertisement but they came up with examples of their own and noted that including the characters speaking with a foreign accent can have various effects in fiction, for example, it causes laughter, it can indicate lower social background, or it may lead to negative connotations (spies in American films speaking with a Russian accent).Chapter Seven examines how fiction can be performed and it focuses on verbal interactions and the functions of fictional dialogue. What linguistics students will find useful here is how narrative can be told. Locher and Jucker refer to the two modes of presentation in fiction. A narrative can be conveyed without any dialogue, that is, through narrators who summarize and report, which is known as “the telling mode.” The other means of narrative presentation is “the showing mode,” which involves very little or no narratorial mediation and leaves the reader as a sole witness to the events, as in drama (127). Next, they propose their own model of the functions of dialogue, which applies to all forms of fiction, such as the novel, drama, and film. There are four categories: the representation of speech exchanges with plot consequences; characterization; presentation of narrative context; and stylistic function and audience appeal (128). Each category is neatly explained using a literary example (Orwell’s Animal Farm, Shakespeare’s Hamlet). The students of literature will be interested in the features of orality (characteristic features of oral speech), which are presented in a table (140). The authors explain definitions, which may be new to them, for example, “address terms,” “adjacency pairs,” or “discourse markers,” which are suitable for the analysis of narrative in both the telling and showing modes.Chapter Eight demonstrates how the pragmatics of fiction is connected with interpersonal pragmatics and how relational work contributes to character identity construction in fiction. The authors explain “relational work” as “all aspects of the work invested by individuals in the construction, maintenance, reproduction and transformation of interpersonal relationships among those engaged in social practice” (Locher and Watts 96). They argue that frames of expectations are crucial in understanding relational work and demonstrate their point using the example of Erin Brockovich (2000), which is a story of a single mother desperately looking for a job and getting one at a local law firm. Erin breaks virtually all frame expectations regarding her dress code and conduct as an office worker, which is how she stands out as a character and builds her identity as a passionate fighter against a big corporation causing water pollution. The chapter also employs (im)politeness research and face theory to highlight their (pragmatic) role in relational work in communication. “Face is a metaphor to describe how people take each other’s projected identities into account” (153)—face-enhancing and face-aggravating behaviors are not only part of real life but of the fictional world as well, the authors claim. What literature students will find important here is how fiction can be a locus to (im)politeness and gender ideologies, which is visible in Jane Austen’s novels showing very restricted female roles in Victorian society. Locher and Jucker analyze a fragment of the novel Emma (1815), whose protagonist takes “liberties of manner” (164) with her impoverished acquaintance at a picnic, her impoliteness being spotted by other guests, which causes Mr Knightley to scold her for her inappropriate behavior.Chapter Nine on the language of emotions in reality and fiction seemed to be my students’ favorite. It falls back on the idea of the “fictional contract” between the author and the reader and explains, for example, why people experience real emotions (sadness, joy, and fear) while reading about the lives and adventures of fictional characters, which is called “the paradox of fiction” (189). The chapter defines the term “emotion” and points out its characteristic features; it also enumerates emotion cues (facial, vocal, physiological, verbal, action, and body cues) in a table (183), and describes the difference between the telling and showing modes of presenting emotions in fiction. I present some of my students’ opinions:The authors in their book used a comic strip to illustrate the showing and telling modes of expressing emotions in fiction whereas I focused on strictly novelistic examples. Among others, I used Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and asked my students to identify the emotional cues of a teenager on an autism spectrum. From an instructor’s point of view, I have to say that this chapter offers multiple ideas of how to analyze the language of emotions in fiction and its theory can be easily adapted to many genres (film, TV series, comic books, and novels).Chapter Ten is entirely devoted to poetry and offers a fresh, relevant theoretic approach to poetic language and communication. It introduces the fundamentals of the relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson) and highlights the fact that all interpretation is an inferential process the key to which is relevance (198). The chapter discusses the differences between everyday and poetic language within the relevant theoretic framework. Everyday language is characterized by strong implicatures as it constitutes relatively clear, unambiguous communication. In poetry, however, the reader needs to invest more energy and processing effort to arrive at a poet’s message. Poetic communication is made of weak implicatures in the form of symbols and metaphors, which it is the reader’s responsibility to decipher. The chapter’s motto is that “poetic effect . . . is achieved through a wide array of weak implicatures” (206). The other part concentrates on the definitions of metaphor and irony. In this approach, metaphors are strongly connected with implicatures and, as far as poetry is concerned, it is creative, ad hoc metaphors lacking conventionalization that build poetic language. Irony is understood as the speaker’s dissociation from the original thought (217), which the authors explain based on Mark Anthony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Chapter Eleven serves as the book’s conclusion where the authors summarize the pragmatic features of fiction and suggest areas of future research.I strongly recommend this textbook for various types of university courses: literature courses (where individual chapters can be used to encourage the students of literature to take up pragmatic analyses of literary texts); pragmatics and general linguistics courses (where students can learn more about the specificity of literary texts and at the same time see that analyzing literary communication is not very different from the analysis of real human interactions); and, finally, the stylistics courses (where the students’ combined knowledge of language and literature is bound to produce the most efficient pragmatic analyses of fiction). The book offers a rich repertoire of pragmatic concepts and theories always backed by examples, convenient tables gathering all knowledge in one place, additional exercises following every chapter, and a glossary with important definitions at the end of the book. It will be clear to every course instructor that the authors of The Pragmatics of Fiction were thinking about students while writing this textbook, adjusting their language, ideas, and examples to a young audience. I allow myself to present some general impressions this book left my students with after reading and discussing it during our course.