Conversation analysis developed in the 1970's in order to understand the structures found in face-to-face conversation and how these structures produce meaning. The 1970's were also a time in which reader-response theories proliferated and gained influenced. Although these two disciplines have had broad influence, they have rarely been combined in order to understand more fully how readers produce meaning when they interact with texts. This book is the first work to combine these disciplines, thereby demonstrating how literary adaptations of structures in everyday conversation guide readers to produce meaning based on their acquired knowledge of these same structures. After an introduction to each of the disciplines, the following chapters concern different elements of everyday conversation and how these are represented in literary discourse in modern English fiction. Chapter topics include the representation of speech and thought, preference organization (e.g., invitation/refusal), nonlexical items (e.g., "mm hm"), body movement, and prosody. In every case, literary discourse has adapted to its graphic medium to represent these elements, even if somewhat imperfectly and less frequently. This representation in literary discourse strongly suggests that readers produce meaning when they interact with texts based on their acquired knowledge of how everyday conversation is structured and organized.