Speaking Parts

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—w...