Book contents
- The Letters in the Story
- The Letters in the Story
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Preface: “To the Reader”
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction The Letters in the Story
- Chapter 1 Framing Narratives and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
- Chapter 2 Letters and Empirical Evidence
- Chapter 3 Cultural Expectations and Encapsulating Letters
- Chapter 4 Epistolary Peripeteiae
- Chapter 5 Hermeneutics of Perspective
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 5 - Hermeneutics of Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2021
- The Letters in the Story
- The Letters in the Story
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Preface: “To the Reader”
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction The Letters in the Story
- Chapter 1 Framing Narratives and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
- Chapter 2 Letters and Empirical Evidence
- Chapter 3 Cultural Expectations and Encapsulating Letters
- Chapter 4 Epistolary Peripeteiae
- Chapter 5 Hermeneutics of Perspective
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Nineteenth-century novels such as Redgauntlet (1824), Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), No Name (1863), or The Moonstone (1868) eliminated any permanent omniscient narrator and gave the perspectives of different characters, or of the same characters at different times, different generic forms – including letter-narratives, narrative-epistolary writing, and letter-narratives containing narrative-epistolary narration – to tell the story entirely through the perspectives afforded by a discontinuous patchwork of genres. Telling a story through characters’ partial and conflicting perspectives was not new – it had been done by eighteenth-century epistolary novels, and other nineteenth-century novels fragmented their story into personal narratives that recounted the story from different narrative perspectives (for instance, Wuthering Heights) or used genre-switching to mark different phases or views of the same story (for instance, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Lady Audley’s Secret) without, for all that, eliminating the connecting and guiding narratorial voice. Superimposing generic and personal perspectival boundaries in the absence of an omniscient narrator was different.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Letters in the StoryNarrative-Epistolary Fiction from Aphra Behn to the Victorians, pp. 220 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021