Abstract

Meaning is of great importance in literary studies, so much so that it is largely taken for granted. Definitions are vague and theories rare. A few theories postulated by aesthetic critics, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, have merit but are unsystematic. Others, produced in the second half under the influence of linguistics, structuralism, deconstruction or so-called new historicism, are more systematic, but are inherently unsound or, if sound, irrelevant to literature. This thesis examines theories put forward by literary critics or by others who have affected them. ;The thesis has four parts, covering aesthetic, linguistic and historicist theories. Part 1 begins with a distinction between those theories of meaning appropriate to science and philosophy and those required for literature. It then considers the ideas of the English "practical critics" with their insistence upon+the+meaning in a poem, the case for pluralism put by William Empson, the notion of a poem's objectivity favoured by some American critics, the academic opposition to psychological theories, and finally the argument between postwar proponents of determinism and indeterminism in American criticism. ;Part 2 considers theories developed from the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Russian Formalists and the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, which, in the 1950s and 1960s, culminated in Paris in the structuralism of the early Roland Barthes and the poststructuralism of Jacques Derrida. ;Part 3 traces the influence of Marx and Engels on early historicist theory, radically altered after 1960 in response to the thought of Louis Althusser. Contrasted with this is Michel Foucault's critique of large historical perspectives. ;Part 4 covers Freudian thought as it affected Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, then the objections of certain Marxists to Postmodernism and finally the humanist views of two Australians, Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller. ;The thesis concludes that, in this century, there have been no cogent theories of meaning in literature. Any workable theory must accomodate certain principles, the most important being that the work is not the text but is whatever the reader realises in reaction to the text