Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction

Reference to or quotation from someone's speech, thoughts, or writing is a key component of narrative. These reports further a narrative, make it more interesting, natural, and vivid, ask the reader to engage with it, and reflect historical cultural understandings of modes of discourse presentation. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends on the ways it presents discourse, and along with it, speech, writing, and thought.

In this book, Beatrix Busse investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction including Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, and many others. At the intersection between corpus linguistics and stylistics, this book develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for systematically analyzing the different narrative strategies of discourse presentation in key pieces of 19th-century narrative fiction. Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction identifies diachronic patterns as well as unique authorial styles, and places them within their cultural-historical context. It also suggests ways for automatically identifying forms of discourse presentation, and shows that the presentation of characters' minds reflects an ideological as well as an epistemological concern about what cannot be reported, portrayed, or narrated. Through insightful interdisciplinary analysis, Busse demonstrates that
discourse presentation fulfills the function of prospection and encapsulation, marks narrative progression, and shapes readers' expectations.

About the Author:
Beatrix Busse is Vice-Rector of Student Affairs and Teaching and Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Cologne (Germany). She is Reviews Editor for the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and honorary research fellow at Glasgow University, and co-author or editor of multiple books including Patterns in Language and Linguistics: New Perspectives on a Ubiquitous Concept (2019), Rethinking Language, Text and Context (2018), Key Terms in Stylistics (2010), and Language and Style (2010). Her main research interests are corpus linguistics, stylistics, historical pragmatics, and language and urban space.