Interpersonal Field: Characters, Narrators, and Readers in the British Novel, 1680-1880

"Interpersonal Field: Characters, Narrators, and Readers in the British Novel, 1680–1880" investigates the formal entanglement of characters, narrators, and readers in what I call the interpersonal field. This dynamic web of relations depends on two rhetorical fictions: substantive character and local narration. The term “substantive character” describes characters whose existence purports to transcend textual representation. The term “local narration” describes narrators who take responsibility for authoring the text but at the same time emphasize their limited personal knowledge and authority. The resulting narratives are fluid zones of engagement, where character jostles against character, character jostles against narrator, and both jostle against the reader, as each struggles to impose a provisional sense of balance and coherence.

"Interpersonal Field" follows this structure in the British novel from the late 1680s, when the British novel first emerged, through the mid-1800s. It touches upon such novelists as Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens. It also addresses how the interpersonal field intersects with British cultural history and with narrative concepts like external (“third-person”) narration, character (“first-person”) narration, unreliable narration, and implied authorship. In the end, this project aspires to wed narratological, critical-theoretical, and cultural-historical approaches to theorize how narrative fiction can reflect and remake the worlds around it.