In Chapter 6, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) are analysed in a pragmatic light. Although many have studied the age-old author–reader relationship in these two novels, rarely have the different pragmatic acts the author/narrator is performing in their address to the reader been highlighted. Studied within Warhol’s broader narratological distinctions between ‘distancing’ and ‘engaging’ narrators (1986, 1989, 1995), these addresses are re-placed within the theoretical model developed in Chapter 1 to enhance the difference between the two texts and show that other references of ‘you’ are present in a way never emphasised in studies of these novels (Brontë’s in particular).

This introductory chapter aims at giving an overview of the pervasiveness of the second-person pronoun across genres, from advertising and political slogans to Twitter via ‘you narratives’ as literature too has taken its ‘you’-turn. Starting from a linguistic template based on face-to-face interactions and adapting it to make it fit written narratives, the chapter offers a theoretical modelling of the possible references of ‘you’, given the degree of congruence between form and function, that could apply to both fictional and non-fictional texts. The pragma-rhetorical approach adopted here foregrounding the author–reader channel allows to transcend the divide between ‘you narratives’ and other genres using the pronoun that the literature has tended to keep separate. It highlights the ethicality of the second-person pronoun as readers are brought to negotiate their relation to the pragmatic effects of ‘you’ in the wide variety of texts investigated in the following chapters. The model that is designed in this chapter gives pride of place to the flesh and blood reader and her potential self-ascription as addressee even in cases where there is only an ‘effect of address’.

If the scientific epistemology parallels Hebraic epistemology in any significant way, then the conceptual paradigms of truth and the mechanics of justification could – or, perhaps, should – follow suit. The Hebraic model of "truth" that emerges differs at key points from some, but not all, of our folk notions of truth today. Specifically, the true/false binary that funds current and popular models of justification appears to be too rigid a model for the Hebraic style. I examine a Hebraic notion of truth and justification in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Although I will put both truth and the logic of justification in conversation with contemporary ideas, I do so only to show both the kinship we share with biblical notions, and the critique offered from the biblical texts.