FICTIONS OF SEEING AND SPEAKING: FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE IN THE NOVELS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF AND NELLA LARSEN
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This dissertation considers how free indirect discourse works in the fictions of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen. Drawing on narratological debates regarding the nature and politics of free indirect discourse, tropological readings of the rhetorical structures of discourse, and scholarship on the relations between rhetoric and social order, this study argues that free indirect discourse in Woolf’s and Larsen’s novels stages concerns about place—proper place, the out-of-place—by at once enacting a mode of moving diegetically beyond the scope of a given narratorial or figural voice and into another and, at the same time, imbricating the latitudes of discursive trespass with the possibilities of narrative overreach and surveillance. The conclusion considers rival discursive instruments in the work of Djuna Barnes.