Abstract

ABSTRACT:

The afterword calls attention to the difficulty of discussing extended passages of dialogue, and suggests some possible approaches. I consider fictional dialogues as changes of narrative pace, and as dramatic shapes that may recur in a novel or a writer's work generally. Such recurring shapes may offer clues about the writer's deepest sense of social interaction. Finding the distinction between direct and indirect speech inadequate to the experience of reading dialogue, I include in the idea of dialogue all of the narrative material—the para-dialogue—that surrounds represented character speech. These approaches are brought to bear on the extended dialogue between Dorothea and Celia Brooke in the first chapter of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which proves to be a kind of template for the shape of conversations throughout the novel.

pdf

Share