Speaking Parts : Conversation, Character, and Social Worlds in Nineteenth-Century British Novels / Tara Menon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Menon, Tara, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, [2026]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

How direct speech in the novel shapes our understanding of literary characters and their social worlds For many readers, to think of nineteenth-century fiction is to recall characters speaking: Elizabeth refusing Darcy in Pride and Prejudice ; Jane excoriating Rochester in Jane Eyre ; Dorothea and Celia discussing Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch . And yet literary critics have had surprisingly little to say about the narrative effects of dialogue. In Speaking Parts , Tara Menon shows how direct speech—words enclosed in quotation marks that appear to be the exact utterances of characters—shapes our understanding of fictional characters and the social worlds they inhabit. Combining computational tools and close literary analysis, Menon reinstates direct speech to its rightful place in narrative theory, worthy of the critical seriousness afforded to such other features of narrative as free indirect discourse. After quantifying direct speech in nearly one thousand British novels written between 1789 and 1901, Menon turns her attention to several canonical nineteenth-century works of fiction by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. She considers, among other things, the ways that Austen establishes sympathy for certain characters through her allotment of speech; the narrative significance of speaking characters not given proper names in Jane Eyre ; and the social isolation of Dorothea in Middlemarch , as revealed by speech networks. Menon shows not only how the study of direct speech allows us to make new arguments about these well-known texts but also that data analysis of speech can change the way we think about characters, individual novels, and even genres.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Reading for Speech

1 How (Not) to Talk in Jane Austen

2 Talking to Strangers in Jane Eyre

3 No One to Talk to in Middlemarch

Conclusion: Careful Counting, Closer Reading

Appendix: A Note on Method

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A note on the type

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed August 05 2026)

ISBN:

9780691235837