Speaking Parts

Conversation, Character, and Social Worlds in Nineteenth-Century British Novels

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 speechwords enclosed in quotation marks that appear to be the exact utterances of charactersshapes 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 ser