Developments in autofictional genre signals: Nouns,pronouns and authorial attachment

Abstract

Autofiction is characterized by ambiguation of generic conventions. While postmodern autofictional texts often explicitly comment on genre, much autofiction avant-la-lettre merges generic modes more subtly, namely through narrative structure and style. The article argues that, therefore, in the exploration of autofiction in a diachronic perspective, consideration of stylistic and narratological details is particularly important, and it outlines developments in autofiction al literature by discussing how three autofictional precursors from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century create generic ambiguity. Henry Fielding, writing before categories of autobiography and novel were properly established, prefaces his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) with comments on the kind of truth it offers by way of rendering autobiographical experiences in artistically crafted form. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writing within the nineteenth century’s much more firmly established genre frames, does not comment on these, but, through pronoun ambiguation and structural elements, imbues the first-person account of the eponymous character of Aurora Leigh (1856) with autobiographical layers of meaning. As part of more explicit challenges to genre conventions from around the turn of the century, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) comments on generic hybridity and experiments with first-person attachment, third-person distancing, and stylistic abstraction. From tracing continuities and differences in how these texts create ambiguity about autobiographical and fictional modes and meanings, this article draws conclusions about attempts to define autofiction and about the role of stylistic analysis in understanding genres diachronically. On the one hand, the article demonstrates that autofiction cannot be defined on the basis of formal and stylistic features alone; on the other, it shows that narratological and stylistic analysis, set against the background of generic transformations in the literary landscape more generally, enables a better understanding of how autofiction works in combination with as well as in opposition to established conventions.

1. Introduction

The contemporary publishing landscape is full of generically hybrid texts suggesting that they belong both to autobiography and to fiction. Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), for example, describes how the narrator prepares for her wedding in the summer of 2017, while following tweets by Donald Trump and news from around the world, all of which suggests autobiographical narration. Yet, at the same time the first-person ‘I’ seems to be fused with the deceased Kathy Acker, which suggests that this must be fiction. Similarly generically confusing is J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), in which a fictive biographer compiles interviews with the aim of writing the biography of the apparently deceased author John Coetzee. Another example is Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), in which a narrator by the name of ‘Ben,’ living and working in Brooklyn, as does the author, explores the possibility of creating alternative worlds through acts of writing and imagining. What is the correct generic categorization for these texts? They are often grouped under the term of autofiction, popularized in the 1970s after it appeared on the back cover of Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977), and used to describe works in which generic categorization and ontological referentiality are difficult to pin down.

This article focuses on two important characteristics of autofictional texts, describing their formal and functional shifts. Firstly, autofictional texts combine modes of autobiography and fiction, which can be expressly signaled or remain only very subtly observable. Secondly, autofictional texts invite the reader to consider the author, the narrator(s), and the character(s) as closely related, while at the same time establishing a degree of distance between these personae. Some autofiction explicitly comments on its generic format and on the relation between author and characters; this is the case more often in works from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. Yet, ambiguity with regard to the aspects of identity and genre also emerges from more subtle narratological and stylistic features. These, as I will argue, deserve further attention, especially in a diachronic perspective. In much autofiction avant-la-lettre, transgressions and mergings of genres and selves are not foregrounded by extensive metacommentary. Nonetheless, they can be traced observably at a stylistic level. The article proposes that, in the exploration of autofiction across literary history, consideration of stylistic elements is particularly important, since attention to details such as narrative perspective, the use or lack of names, and the choice of pronouns help one to recognize examples of autofiction from earlier centuries. The same focus also aids us in understanding how (proto-) autofictional texts negotiate the generic conventions of a given period.

This article approaches the question of genre and authorial attachment from a stylistic and narratological perspective, asking how specific textual criteria work to cue particular interpretative stances, and how the links between formal structures and textual effects develop in a diachronic perspective. The approach is based on an understanding of genre as negotiated between author and reader, which entails a cognitive and institutional understanding of fictionality. This means that a text is considered fictional neither because of the ontological status of characters and events featured, nor because of its referential value or truth content. Rather, a text is seen as fictional because it employs aesthetic conventions that readers understand on the basis of learned cognitive frames or schemata, as abstract knowledge representations that cue distinct processing modes (on schema theory, see, for example, Cook, 1994; Stockwell, 2009). Signals of fictionality, in this understanding, can take the form of paratextual labels but also emerge from stylistic features. Fictionalization, in consequence, can imply invention but also artistical craft. It is important to note that fictionality signals can be misinterpreted and intentionally ignored; this means that fictionality, as well as autofictionality – understood as qualities attributed by the reader on the basis of textual cues – are in part an effect of reading (see also Effe and Gibbons, 2022).

Autofictional texts send ambivalent signals that cue for both autobiographical and fictional frames of reading. Focusing on form and function of selected stylistic and narratological traits, the article maps diachronic changes in how autofictional texts create such ambiguity. The article shows that autofictional style transforms across literary history, while at the same time demonstrating that there is no form—function mapping and no linear development. These findings have implications in several respects: for attempts to define autofiction through textual criteria; for a diachronic exploration of autofictional practice; and more broadly for the study of diachronicity in language and literature. Based on three case studies, the article demonstrates that stylistic characteristics alone are insufficient to distinguish autofictional texts from more straightforwardly fictional and autobiographical ones. An analysis of autofictional style is nonetheless necessary, I argue, since such an approach yields insights into how a given text manages to invite readers to interpret it as an autobiographical-fictional hybrid, namely by adopting a given period’s generic and aesthetic conventions, but also by pushing against them.

Since, especially in earlier centuries, autofictional texts are outliers rather than the norm, and, moreover, since autofictionality lies in part in the eye of the beholder, this article eschews the use of larger corpora as customarily used in the field of linguistics. Distant reading approaches (see, for example, Moretti, 2013) have recently started to be adopted also in literary studies, but for a study of autofictional diachronicity, case-study based and contextualized close-readings are more insightful. In the spirit of this special issue, this article aims to show the benefits of an integration of linguistic and literary approaches, which, so the claim, through stylistic, narratological, and contextual analyses, generates new insights on diachronicity in language and literature. Due to limitations of space as well as this author’s disciplinary bias, the article’s linguistic discussions will admittedly only touch the surface. The article is offered in the hope that, despite these constraints, the analyses carried out make apparent the potentials of an integration of linguistics and literary studies.

2. Autofictional style in a diachronic perspective

The article centers on three case studies: Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), and Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907). These texts were selected for a range of base-level commonalities in terms of form, content, and aims likely pursued by their authors, that should make diachronic comparison of developments in respect to these criteria more productive. All three texts give an account of a particular stage in the life of their respective authors. In Fielding’s case, we read an end-of-life account of his final months on the journey to Lisbon, where shortly after his arrival he was to die in 1754. Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes her heroine’s development as a poetess, including a report of her writing a long verse poem. In many respects, although not in all details, Aurora’s life mirrors Barrett Browning’s own journey towards successful authorship and her own writing of Aurora Leigh. Edmund Gosse, in a depersonalized abstraction, tells of his journey towards emancipation from his parents and from the religious beliefs they stood for, and he explains his choice of art as a vocation and alternative to religion.

A second feature that links all three texts is that they make general claims and convey universal, or at least more widely transferable, truths to the reader, in addition to offering an autobiographical account. Fielding, who next to being a novelist served as a magistrate, envisions his book as instructing readers, for example, on points of commercial legislation, which he perceived to be deficient, or in his proposals on how to better provide food for the poor. Aurora Leigh comments on societal strictures in terms of life models available for women, and the text also engages in a feminist advocacy for women’s right to pursue a profession, in particular that of the artist. Father and Son serves Gosse to mount a critique of the values of his parents’ generation, in particular criticizing forms of hypocrisy and sternness, which he associates with religious doctrines.

A final commonality in all three texts concerns the fact that they feature first-person narrators. While one might think that this narrative form must be a prerequisite for autofiction, there actually exist a range of autofictional texts told in the third person, for example, Christine Brooke-Rose’s two books Remake (1996) and Life, End of (2006) as well as Coetzee’s autrebiographical trilogy, comprising Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime. In our case studies, first-person narration is not in all cases employed consistently throughout.

The narrators of Fielding’s Journal, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and Gosse’s Father and Son are all attached to, but also detached from, their respective authors: this kind of ambivalence may in fact be autofiction’s only fundamental criterion. It is in the narrative strategies through which partial attachment and detachment is achieved that the three texts differ; and in these differences it is possible to map a development. Lanser (2005) points out that first-person narrative always ‘taunts us with the possibility that the ’I’ of the fiction has some relation to the author’s ’I’’ (2005: 207), and she lists five criteria as facilitating such authorial attachment (Lanser, 2005: 212–214). Her criteria are a helpful starting point for understanding how autofiction invites, but also complicates, attachment, and how earlier examples of autofiction relate to present-day forms.

Lanser’s first criterion is singularity, designating the presence of a single narrative voice at the highest diegetic level. This is a prerequisite for autobiography but not for autofiction. Coetzee’s Summertime, for example, features the voices of five interviewees together with the voice of the (invented) biographer and that of the (auto-)biographical subject, who speaks in what appear to be diary entries.

Lanser’s second criterion—identity—refers to (perceived) social similarities between narrator and author. This criterion is directly linked to that of anonymity, meaning absence of a speaker’s name. Authorial attachment, Lanser notes, is easier if a narrator is anonymous; unless, of course, author and speaker share a name. While autobiography requires onomastic correspondence, autofiction does not. Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (comprising Outline, 2014; Transit, 2016; and Kudos, 2018) is an example of autofiction in which the narrator-protagonist bears a name different from that of her author. It is noteworthy that this name (‘Faye’) appears only once in each book, which facilitates authorial attachment. One might think also of Ben Lerner’s autofictional books published before and after 10:04: Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and The Topeka School (2019). Both feature an author alter ego by the name of Adam Gordon. Autofiction often uses names to invite and at the same time complicate authorial attachment. Brooke-Rose’s Remake (1996), for example, features multiple author alter egos; they are called ‘Tess,’ ‘the old lady,’ and ‘John₁’, ‘John₂’, etc. Other texts imply that attachment is not straightforward by using only a given name, initials, or names loosely patterned on the author’s. Consider, for instance, ‘S.H.’ in Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future (2019) or Philip Roth’s doppelgänger ‘Pipik’ in Operation Shylock (1993). This kind of playful use of names is a stylistic strategy that the autofictional texts discussed in this article develop towards.

Lanser’s fourth criterion—reliability—is closely linked to those of identity and nonnarrativity (Lanser’s fifth criterion). By reliability, Lanser refers to shared values and beliefs between narrator and author. A narrator’s mindset is visible mostly in nonnarrative comments, that is, in expressions of thoughts or feelings rather than when recounting actions and events. Autofiction can feature complex plots but an often substantial degree of interiority, which also entails nonnarrativity, is inbuilt in the genre because autofiction is usually concerned to a significant degree with the author’s mental processes. Reliability, like identity, is a criterion that autofiction always fulfills to some degree but also always departs from. At the very least autofiction asks readers to speculate whether a character’s attitudes exactly match those of the author. In Summertime, for example, the fictive biographer dismisses the diaries, letters, and notebooks belonging to ‘John’ on account of their being a ‘fiction of himself for his correspondents, [...] for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity’ (Coetzee, 2009: 225). Coetzee presumably shares the sentiment that these sources ‘cannot be trusted [...] as a factual record’ (2009: 225). Summertime as a whole, however, in juxtaposing different perspectives and voices coming from a range of real-life but in their representation in the book fictionalized acquaintances of the author, emphasizes the biases and distortions of each of them, which suggests that Coetzee would very likely also dismiss the very notion of a ‘factual record,’ at least in the realm of auto/biography.

In describing how contemporary autofiction, and also diachronic precursors, invite and complicate authorial attachment, we should add to Lanser’s criteria the element of generic self-reflexivity. Such self-reflexivity can have both attaching and detaching effects. In Brooke-Rose’s Remake, for instance, the debate between ‘the old lady’ and ‘John’ focuses on the truth-value, fictionality, and generic category of the life narrative contained in the book, thus allowing readers to ‘overhear’ Brooke-Rose commenting on her own text while being alerted to the fact that they are reading a fictional artifact. We could complement Lanser’s criteria also with elements from Gibbons’s ‘cognitive-stylistic model of contemporary autonarration’ (a term proposed as an alternative to autofiction) (2018: 84; see also Giovanelli’s (2021) development of Gibbon’s cognitive-stylistic model through integration with Cognitive Grammar). In this account, which to my best knowledge is the only existing stylistic account of autofiction, Gibbons describes characteristics along three fields of deixis as follows. In the field of perceptual deixis, her model lists onomastic identity of author and narrator-character, first-person narration, although she notes that this is not a prerequisite, and direct reader address. In the field of compositional deixis, Gibbons lists paratextual fictionality signals as well as textual signals that complicate clear categorization of the text as fictional, for example blending of fictionalized elements and verifiable details. In terms of textual deixis, the model lastly lists metatextual references, references to the writing process, references to other authors, references to publishing-related acts, and intertextual references to artefacts from the real world, such as newspaper articles or novels, including texts published by the author. The present article does not engage with all of these elements systematically, but several will be observed as creating forms of authorial attachment or detachment in our three case studies.

It is important to stress that Gibbons’s model, as well as my account of how present-day autofiction often creates and simultaneously complicates authorial attachment, describes merely common stylistic features. These cannot be used to define autofiction. The aspects selected for analysis in this article do, however, help to recognize early autofictional texts and serve as reference points for illustrating a development of autofictional forms.

2.1. Henry Fielding’s The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755)

Fielding’s signaling of generic hybridity is to be seen within two contexts: the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century, and the fact that autobiography is at this point not yet an established genre. For much of the eighteenth century, novelistic texts appear in the form of first-person narratives. In the initial decades of the century, they, in addition, usually abide by pseudofactual conventions, which means that they ask readers to pretend to believe that the account is, or is based on, a historical document produced by a real person—often a diary, a journal, a collection of letters, or a memoir (on eighteenth-century pseudofactual aesthetics, see Foley (1986) and Paige (2011, 2021); on these aesthetics in relation to the eighteenth-century novel, see Gallagher (2006) and Gjerlevsen (2016, 2018). Autobiographical forms of writing, while not to be equated with autobiography as genre, are, in other words, the norm for the early eighteenth-century. Yet, explicit self-presentation is still perceived as being unseemly, as evidenced in the fact that up to and including much of the Romantic period (when the term autobiography was coined in 1797), authors tend to stress their texts’ documentary, instructional and/or entertaining value, downplaying the self-presentational dimension of autobiographical modes. ¹

At the time of Fielding’s writing, the transition from the pseudofactual to an aesthetics of fictionality is in progress. Novelistic texts start to develop away from the documentary, from what Foley understands as ‘an intrinsically ironic, even parodic contract’; this contract demands of readers to accept characters as invented but simultaneously to approach the text as if it were nonfictional, say, a real diary (1986: 108). At the same time, novels develop towards what Gallagher sees as a serious attempt to convince readers that an invented story is ‘literally true’ or ‘at least about actual people’ (2006: 337). Novels become ‘unabashedly fictional’ (Foley, 1986: 144), i.e., explicitly asserting truth through ‘analogous configuration’ or, in Gallagher’s terms tell generalized truth via an ‘explicitly nonreferential, fictional individual’ (2006: 342). Paige’s description of pseudofactual and fictional aesthetics is also helpful for understanding Fielding’s hybrid mode. According to Paige, pseudofactual conventions are based on the belief that historical people and events affect readers more strongly, while fictional conventions are grounded in the conviction that what is valuable and what asserts affective effects is the experience created by the crafted text (Paige, 2020: 598). Autofictional aesthetics—as we see in Fielding’s example—are often grounded in a combination of these effects, which shows that Paige’s theses are applicable to the analysis of diachronic developments in autofictional hybridity more generally.

The title of Fielding’s book signals generic hybridity through subtle stylistic details. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon gestures towards the autobiographical nature of the account, but simultaneously to the general truths it is to convey. A journal is by definition an autobiographical document, but Fielding’s use of articles (‘the journal’ and ‘a voyage’)—rather than possessive determiners or the author’s name (‘my journal’/‘Henry Fielding’s journal’ and ‘my voyage’/‘Henry Fielding’s voyage’)—stresses reportorial and general truths (the latter of which associated also with the novel) rather than personal ones. The long noun phrase of the title directs the reader to both the form of the account and to its content rather than to the author. Nonetheless, indirectly the journal format gestures towards the writer of the journal, who, we are invited to assume since no other name is given, must be the author of the book in question.

Fielding represents a particularly interesting case study for developments in the signaling of autofictional hybridity since he reflects on pseudofactual conventions as well as on the effects of fictional and autobiographical forms. Fielding knows that a first-person account by the author needs justification and so does its fictionalization. In a preface to the Journal, he presents his text as a hybrid between journalistic travel report, autobiographical account, and novel. The aim of much eighteenth-century literature before romanticism is to educate and to divert, and Fielding offers his book as having these qualities. The book aims to provide, he states, ‘instruction in the vehicle of entertainment’ (Fielding, [1755] 1996: 11). For this purpose, Fielding explains, he takes his autobiographical experiences as a starting point and imbues them with fictional qualities. He declares that his book ‘deviate[s] less from truth than any other voyage extant’ ([1755] 1996: 10) but adds that ‘[s]ome few embellishments must be allowed to every historian.’ That there is a ‘foundation in truth,’ he elaborates, should stop critics ‘from denying all kind of ornament of stile or diction, or even of circumstance,’ the omission of which would lead to ‘loss of an additional pleasure in the perusal.’ Fielding proclaims himself critical of the kind of author who deems his life interesting per se, who, as he puts it, thinks nothing ‘trivial that in any manner happens to himself’ ([1755] 1996: 9). He also criticizes those who think facts worthy of reporting merely because ‘the fact is true,’ without taking into consideration ‘whether it is capable of pleasing or surprising, of diverting or informing the reader.’ In his Journal, Fielding assures his readers that incidents reported ‘tend directly to the instruction of the reader, or to the information of the public’ ([1755] 1996: 10) and should not be censured for being conveyed ‘with an air of joke and laughter’ ([1755] 1996: 11). The preface justifies fictionalization in terms of fictional rather than pseudofactual aesthetics, namely as entertainment and instruction grounded in large parts in the author’s artistic craft. Nonetheless, in abiding by conventions of the pseudofactual regime, Fielding also asserts the value of the report’s basis in actual events.

While both the preface and the ensuing text are narrated in the first person, we can observe stylistic differences between the two parts of the book. For one, instances of metacommentary, while in singular instances appearing also in the main body of the text, are for the main reserved for the preface. Secondly, only in the latter is there direct speech and character description. Thirdly, the kind of embellishments and ornaments that Fielding in the preface comments on are to be found only in the latter part of the text. The summary effect of these stylistic differences is that the preface appears more strongly as written in the voice of Fielding as author, while the ensuing narrative suggests a degree of distance between this author and the first-person narrator of the journey. This difference, although only slight, also means that Lanser’s criterion of singularity—the presence of only one narrative voice at the highest diegetic level—is in Fielding’s book met only in part.

By signaling fictionality—namely, that he ornaments his experience through ‘stile’ and ‘diction’ and in addition invents ‘circumstance’—Fielding creates distance between the protagonist and the historical author. The latter agent makes apparent that he to some extent caricatures the former. The result is an autobiographical end-of-life account that conveys general rather than, or in addition to, personal truths, and that is fictionalized in order to entertain and instruct. For example, Fielding uses his personal suffering as a starting point for observations that can be applied more broadly. What is more, he does so by way of stylistic strategies more strongly evoking frames of fictional storytelling than factual report, including stylistic choices such as exaggeration that effect ironic distancing. In the Journal’s first diary entry, for example, the narrator dramatizes in amplified and literary form his experience of being observed in his state of illness when boarding the ship. He foregrounds artistic craft through the alliteration in the references to ‘a spectacle of the highest horror,’ and to the ‘total loss of limbs’ ([1755] 1996: 23). These references moreover appear slightly over the top. The exaggerations continue when the narrator pictures his face as ‘contain[ing] marks of a most diseased state, if not of death itself.’ The tone becomes more strongly ironic yet, when the narrator reports having to pass through rows of sailors ‘paying their compliments […] by all manner of insults and jest on [his] misery,’ which felt to him like ‘run[ning] the gauntlope’ ([1755] 1996: 23). By using a metaphor derived from a military punishment in which criminals receive a lash with a whip from each man they pass (the present-day idiom is to run the gauntlet), Fielding emphasizes the cruelty he wants to address, but, especially in combination with flaunted stylistic crafting of the passage, the exaggeration and metaphorization also foregrounds his role as creative author, who through these stylistic measures creates a degree of ironic detachment from the literal utterances of his narrator. Lanser’s criteria of reliability and identity, in other words, are not met fully. Fictionalizing through style and diction allows Fielding to offer ‘a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity, in the nature of men,’ which, so the narrator comments—and here he arguably speaks also for his author—he has ‘often contemplated with concern.’ He describes it as a ‘barbarous custom [...] peculiar to the English, and of them only the lowest degree’ and as an ‘excrescence of an uncontroul’d licentiousness mistaken for liberty.’ Yet, readers are arguably invited to ask whether, had Fielding fully shared his narrator’s distress upon being exposed in his state of illness, he would have committed his disease to paper for the public to read in the form in which we receive it in his Journal. The fact that Fielding gives his narrator’s suffering such close attention strongly suggests that the author does not, at least not primarily and un-ironically, provide a confessional account.

Fielding’s Journal even includes instances of metanarrative commentary that foreground fictionalization. For instance, the narrator recounts how a sailor, ironically named ‘honest Tom,’ delivers a report to the ship’s captain:

Tom had no sooner swallowed his draught, than he hastily began his narrative, and faithfully related what had happened on board our ship; we say faithfully, tho’ from what happened it may be suspected that Tom chose to add, perhaps, only five or six immaterial circumstances, as is always, I believe, the case, and may possibly have been done by me in relating this very story, tho’ it happened not many hours ago. (Fielding, [1755] 1996: 87)

Tom and the captain converse aboard a neighboring ship in the narrator’s absence, who is nonetheless able to lay the scene out for readers from the position of an omniscient narrator, which allows him to comment on how Tom finishes his drink and to remark on Tom’s manner of speech. Especially in combination with the narrator’s comment that he similarly may have added details in his own account, this (by real-world parameters) impossible narratorial stance draws attention to the fictionalizations in Fielding’s Journal. By means of such instances of self-reflexivity, Fielding appears to take readers into his confidence, but at the same time draws attention to the creative licenses he takes in his text.

Fielding, in sum, offers a text that is clearly presented as autobiographical, but through subtle stylistic distancing creates a degree of detachment from the character portrayed. The example of Fielding’s Journal shows, for one, that generic self-reflexivity concerning novelistic and autobiographical modes exists before the genres of autobiography and the novel are properly established. One can also see an author develop a concept of how autobiographical and fictional modes of writing can work together before the genre of autofiction is conceived of as such. Secondly, Fielding’s example shows that hybridity and detachment can be created without the kind of grammatical and structural distancing through changes in name and/or pronoun that become more common in autofictional texts from later periods, and which we will observe in our two other case studies.

2.2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856)

In Barrett Browning’s times, novel and autobiography are firmly established genres. Readers know that novels supply entertainment, general truth, and also instruction. In this period, the belief that reading can be beneficial for self-formation rehabilitates the novel from charges of providing merely light entertainment and of corrupting the sensibilities of the reader (Littau, 2006: 71). The Bildungsroman form, in particular, was valued for educating readers through presenting a character’s development towards maturity. Autobiographies, too, were meant to offer models to be emulated, especially in the Victorian age. At the time, most authors presented their texts clearly as either an autobiography or a novel, but hybrid forms can also be found. The novel in autobiographical form, sometimes referred to as fictional autobiography, is a popular genre that combines novelistic and autobiographical formats. Several fictional autobiographies are based on autobiographical experiences; prominent examples include Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Some of these texts moreover have autofictional qualities. This is the case in Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), which ambiguates the categories of genre as well as identity and ontological reference, with the result that the character’s story and voice also become the author’s.

Barrett Browning’s motivation for choosing a hybrid autofictional form seems to root in an internalization of the period’s strictures on self-expression, especially for women. While for men self-presentation was more acceptable at the time, for women it was still regarded as unseemly. In an early essay, whose first version she wrote in 1818 and which she then reworked two years later, Barrett Browning describes the practice of ‘be[ing] one’s own chronicler’ as ‘a task generally dictated by extreme vanity,’ and advises her ‘patient auditors’: ‘if you wish to keep up your spirits never [...] write your own life’ (1974: 133). Yet, this essay constitutes an autobiographical act and attests to an autobiographical impulse on the part of Barrett Browning, even if she offers her self-presentation together with an apologetic note. In Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning makes use of autofictional ambiguity to reconcile this impulse with prescriptions against public self-expression, creating what LaPorte describes as ‘the period’s supreme example of how to navigate the perils of poetic autobiography’ (2013: 829).

Considering that, at the time when Barrett Browning was writing, female self-expression was discouraged and that novel and autobiography were firmly established as seemingly distinct genres, it makes sense that Aurora Leigh does not explicitly reflect on its own hybrid narrative strategies. Barrett Browning no longer needs the kind of explanations that Fielding offers before the conventionalization of the genres of autobiography and fiction, and she does not yet want to explicitly challenge generic conventions in the way that Gosse does five decades later. Barrett Browning primarily presents Aurora Leigh as a novel, but her experiments with pronoun use and tense subtly imbue the book with autobiographical and collective layers of meaning. Through these narrative strategies, she covertly circumvents the period’s prescriptions against self-expression by women.

Barrett Browning’s stylistic and structural navigations of autobiographical forms take shape in a displacement of author onto heroine, through whose perspective we nonetheless hear the voice of Barrett Browning and in whose life we see also that of the author. Aurora Leigh is a blank-verse poem in Künstlerroman form, in which Aurora serves as first-person narrator. She gives an account of her upbringing and of how she develops reading habits; she reports on some romantic entanglements; and she relates how, motivated by professional ambitions, she eventually becomes a successful poetess. At first sight, author and heroine appear clearly ‘detached,’ namely distanced through the name of the fictional heroine. As opposed to Fielding’s Journal (and Gosse’s Father and Son), Barrett Browning’s title promises a narrative about a particular person—a person who is not the author—rather than the autobiographically-rooted and generalizable accounts suggested by the noun phrase ‘the journal of a voyage’ or by the abstract categories of father and son. Yet, on closer look, Barrett Browning’s book invites authorial attachment, at least to a certain degree. Already in the dedication, which announces the work to be one ‘into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’ (Barrett Browning, [1856] 2008: 3), we find subtle hints—namely, the suggestion that Barrett Browning’s own beliefs and principles are those expressed in the book. Subsequently, stylistic and structural elements serve to ambiguate who the first-person account belongs to.

Firstly, the fact that, in mis-en-abyme style, Aurora is writing a long narrative poem within the long narrative poem that has been written by Barrett Browning creates an effect of structural mirroring that suggests an alignment of author and heroine. Secondly, Lanser’s criteria of identity and reliability are largely met. There are a range of discernible biographical parallels between author and heroine, and Aurora’s convictions about art and the role of women can plausibly be taken as being shared by her author. Thirdly, long parts of the book are strongly nonnarrative in Lanser’s terms. Untypically for the Victorian period, the book foregrounds interiority. It is comprised of long passages of extensive self-reflection, which are strictly speaking the character’s musings but are easy to read also as her author’s own reflections. Relating mostly to Aurora’s path towards becoming an acclaimed poetess, conducted in the first person, and centering on the first-person narrator’s inner motives, perceptions, thoughts, and convictions, content and style of these passages invite authorial attachment despite the characters being named non-identically. In addition, both the autobiographical story and the fictional tale about Aurora/Barrett Browning represent the experience of a larger collective of women—an effect created through pronoun choice and references to women overarchingly (as detailed below). From this perspective, the degree of distance between author and character becomes irrelevant.

At several points, the first-person ‘I’ even fits the author better than the character, since the utterances in question more aptly refer to Barrett Browning’s composition of Aurora Leigh than to her character’s writing act. For instance, the poem’s first lines make a statement of purpose that, while theoretically attributable to Aurora, is more readily attributed to the author, perhaps also because, at the very beginning of the poem, Barrett Browning is likely most prominent in readers’ minds. The book starts with the lines: ‘I who have written much in prose and verse/For others’ uses, will write now for mine--/Will write my story for my better self’ (Book II, Il.2–4). While Aurora is an author, too, no earlier publications from her exist, of course, which means that the passage is most easily read as Barrett Browning commenting on her previous output and announcing that she now writes this poem as an act of self-improvement. The speaker continues with references to writing, first in the present tense—‘I, writing thus, am still what men call young’ (Book l, l.9); ‘I write’ (Book l, l.29)—and then switches to the past tense of a more traditional autobiography: ‘My mother was a Florentine’ (Book I, l.29). Especially since the proper noun appears for the first time only in line 45—‘I, Aurora Leigh, was born’—there is some ambiguity as to whether the ‘I’ announcing the intention to write for her better self is the same ‘I’ that bears the name ‘Aurora Leigh’ or whether the switch to the past tense entails a switch from author to character.

Aurora Leigh’s present-tense passages are particularly easily attached to the author because they feature general reflections on society and art. For example, the speaker follows the past-tense statement, ‘I, Aurora Leigh, was born/To make my father sadder, and myself/Not overjoyous, truly’ (Book II, ll.45–47), with a reflection in the present tense on fathers and mothers: ‘Women know/The way to rear up children, [to be just,]/They know a simple, merry, tender knack/Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes’ (Book II, ll.47–50). These comments are attributable to Barrett Browning at least as much as to Aurora. Where past-tense comments can be read as belonging both to character and author, these usually concern Aurora’s and Barrett Browning’s journey of artistic development and their writing of a long prose poem. The narrator proclaims, for example, ‘I stood/Woman and artist—either incomplete’ (Book II, II.3–5). She also tells us,

I’ve set myself to art!! What then? what’s done?

What’s done, at last?

Behold, at last, a book.

If life-blood’s necessary,—which it is,

[…]

If life-blood’s fertilising, I wrung mine

On every leaf of this. (Book V, ll.351–57)

These references to the narrator’s artistic work are applicable to Barrett Browning and her act of writing Aurora Leigh as much as to her character’s work as a poetess.

Passages in the first-person plural voice, too, invite authorial attachment, since Barrett Browning forms part of a group of women and artists so that this grammatical structure encompasses the group and herself. For example, when the narrative voice states, ‘We women are too apt to look to one [a person], ² /Which proves a certain impotence in art’ (Book V, ll.43–44), it makes little difference whether the thought is attributed to the author or the heroine. Aurora’s account refers to female writers more generally, and to some extent even to women as such, as the proclamation ‘As women are but Auroras!’ (Book VII, l.118) makes explicit. Appearing in a contemplative passage on the different natures and roles of men and women, this use of the heroine’s name as a stand-in for women in general encapsulates how Barrett Browning’s book conveys collective truths through Aurora’s narrative. Aurora’s words contain gnomic truths—namely, general ones applicable beyond Aurora’s and Barrett Browning’s personal cases, as they are often expressed in proverbs. To an extent, Aurora Leigh as a whole can be seen as conveying proverbial wisdoms based on shared human experience, shared by Aurora and her author, and perhaps by women overall.

Already on the plot level, Barrett Browning challenges societal expectations regarding female professions and life models by telling the story of a female artist who gains a degree of independence and puts her professional vocation above romantic happiness. By aligning herself with her heroine, Barrett Browning additionally disobeys Victorian strictures against female self-expression. Barrett Browning’s example shows how subtle stylistic autofictional ambiguation can transgress fairly firmly established generic conventions and how genre boundaries can be pushed at without self-reflexive commentary; ambiguation occurs, so to speak, ‘below the radar.’ Challenges to genre categories become more prominent towards the turn-of-the century. This is visible in our next case study, which in addition introduces new stylistic and structural ways of aligning and distancing author and character.

2.3. Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907)

In Gosse’s Father and Son, generic self-reflexivity, which we saw earlier in Fielding, resurfaces. Gosse provides a diagnosis of the limitations of auto/biographical narratives, which his own fictionalization is supposed to remedy. Gosse’s stylistic experiment can be interpreted as reacting to turn-of-the-century challenges to generic boundaries and as responding to modernism, especially its aims to innovate representational forms. Gosse’s work exemplifies a development towards texts that, more explicitly than Barrett Browning’s, comment on genre conventions and on how to counter or undermine them. Gosse’s hybrid autofictional mode needs to be seen in the context of aesthetic values of fin-de-siècle and modernist culture, wherein impersonality and artistic autonomy are associated with literary merit. In light of this trend, fictionalization and abstraction can be understood as strategies designed to increase interest in the book and heighten the author’s prestige. Moreover, since Gosse’s text constitutes a severe reckoning with the parent generation, the same strategies serve to soften the personal attack that the account would have constituted in more conventional autobiographical form. Finally, Gosse’s fictionalization of his personal situation forms part of an elevation of ‘the life of imagination’ over ‘the life of fact’ (Saunders, 2010: 56), as it is propagated by the Aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century, prominently represented by authors such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. The influence of this movement on Gosse is clearly visible in Father and Son (see also Newton, 2009: xxii). At the level of content, the book explores the value of the imagination, of art, and of fluidity of meaning as opposed to scientific or religious doctrines. Secondly, Gosse’s hybrid mode of writing constitutes an elevation of the imagination at the level of form.

Father and Son, subtitled A Study of Two Temperaments, was initially published anonymously. The title, through its use of two generic nouns without determiner and the kind of scientific neutrality suggested by the noun phrase of the subtitle, emphasizes general truths rather than a personal account. Nonetheless, attachment of the author to the first-person ‘I’ and to the abstraction of ‘the son’ is invited. While first names and the family name of Edmund and Philip Gosse do not appear within the narrative, a picture of father and son features as frontispiece. We thus have Lanser’s criterion of anonymity met, and in addition find a pictorial link between narrator, protagonist, and author. From the fourth impression onwards (which was published in March 1908), Gosse’s name as author was also added officially, perhaps because it was now clear that the text overall had a positive reception. In an additional preface to the fourth edition, Gosse speaks of a ‘slight veil of anonymity which [he] originally drew over this narrative,’ but which, he realizes, ‘was long ago torn to tatters’ (cited in Newton, 2009: xxix). While the book signals that Edmund and Philip Gosse map onto the generic categories of ‘son’ and ‘father,’ stylistic details and generic metacommentary make it impossible to determine how far and in what respects these historical people have been artistically transformed into novelistic characters and/or prototypes for scientific treatise. Lanser’s criterion of reliability is hence fulfilled largely but not conclusively.

The same goes for the criterion of singularity of voice. In contrast to Fielding and Barrett Browning, Gosse does not use the first person throughout his text. The main body of the work offers a first-person account from the son’s perspective, but the book begins and ends with reflections in third-person narration. The original preface doubly distances author from character. For one, the preface is written in the third person, referring to ‘[t]he writer of these recollections’; secondly, this writer announces an account of ‘the Son’ (Gosse, [1907] 2009: 3). Use of the third person distances ‘the writer of these recollections’ from Gosse, and, since this writer in turn refers to ‘the Son’ in the third person, this entity is yet further removed from the actual author. In addition, the use of article and common noun in place of the proper noun turns ‘the Son’ into a generalizable character detached from the individual whom this character nonetheless represents. The third-person reference and abstraction continues in the initial paragraphs of the first chapter, with phrases like ‘the two human beings here described,’ ‘these two persons,’ and ‘the survivor’ ([1907] 2009: 5). All of these noun phrases can, but do not straightforwardly, refer to the two Gosses. In the third paragraph, the writer-narrator switches to the first person. The narrating self initially retains distance from the entities it writes about, stating that ‘to familiarize my readers with the conditions of the two persons [...] it is needful to open with some account of all that I can truly and independently recollect’ ([1907] 2009: 5). Here the ‘I’ refers still to the latter-day narrating self. When this narrative voice uses first-person possessive determiners not only with reference to ‘my readers’ but now also speaks of ‘[m]y parents,’ ‘my Father’s family,’ and ‘[m]y maternal grandfather,’ the gap between the writer (narrating self) and the character written about (the experiencing self) is bridged, at least for some time. Since the character of the son is here equated with the writer of the narrative, this introductory section constitutes a strong invitation to authorial attachment, while at the same time emphasizing the book’s more general applications.

The first-person mode continues from then on until, in the final paragraphs of the text, there is another switch back to third-person distancing. First, the narrating self addresses ‘[t]he reader who has done me the favour to follow this record of the clash of two temperaments’ and tells them about the ‘crowning importance of the letter from which I have just made a long quotation […].’ The narrator then proposes that ‘I may leave it to form the epigraph of this little book’ ([1907] 2009: 186). The repeated deictic references to the material we are reading—it, for the letter, and this little book—invite equating narrator and author. Father and Son does not ultimately end with this letter, however, but adds two more paragraphs in which the son is again referred to in the third person, and in which the general truths that Father and Son is supposed to convey are re-emphasized. The narrator foregrounds the book’s exemplarity as an account of ‘a thoughtful and honest young man’ possessing ‘the normal impulses of his twenty-one years […]’ ([1907] 2009: 186). Upon meeting the kind of defiance that Gosse did on the part of his father, such a young man can choose between two alternatives: ‘Either he must cease to think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized’ ([1907] 2009: 186). In this particular case, we learn further that ‘the young man’s conscience threw off once and for all the yoke of his ‘dedication,’ and, as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance, he took a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself’ ([1907] 2009: 186). It is Edmund Gosse, who took this privilege, and he tells the story of how he came to assert his independence from Philip Gosse and his religious fundamentalism. Yet, in Father and Son, in part as effect of the stylistic choice not to name the character, and owing to additional elements of genericity, Gosse tells this story as at the same time a more general account of a young man of his generation who is faced with typical struggles resulting from the current societal developments and from the time’s characteristic clashes between generations.

One of the effects of Gosse’s combination of fictional and autobiographical modes is to both relate personal experiences and to convey general truths. The combination moreover serves to offer readers an entertaining experience of an authentic account. These aims are apparent in Gosse’s tentative explanation of the book’s hybrid generic status, provided in his preface. Gosse announces a ‘diagnosis of a dying puritanism’ and ‘a study of the development of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy’ ([1907] 2009: 3). The use of abstractions in the form of indefinite articles and common nouns—rather than that of possessive determiners and proper nouns—reiterates the title’s claims to general rather than individual applicability. Gosse moreover stresses that his narrative is ‘in all its parts, and so far as the punctilious attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, […] scrupulously true’ ([1907] 2009: 3). He feels it necessary to emphasize this truth especially ‘[a]t the present hour, when fiction takes form so ingenious and so specious’ ([1907] 2009: 3). Yet, Gosse admits to ‘tampering with precise fact,’ for example by changing names, which he does, as he explains, to ‘avoid any appearance of offence’. Gosse also describes the book as ‘a genuine slice of life’ ([1907] 2009: 4), a phrase that is associated with naturalist fiction, and must, as Swann (2001: 30) notes, be at least semi-consciously intended to put fiction in the reader’s mind.

What is more, fictionality is signaled throughout the main body of the text. The first chapter foregrounds fictional qualities of the account when the first-person narrator announces that he reports ‘all that I can truly and independently recollect’ together with ‘some statements which are, as will be obvious, due to household tradition’ (Gosse, [1907] 2009: 5). As the narrative continues, the narrator mentions several times that he does not provide the reader with all details, neither about his parents nor about himself. Alluding to the genres of autobiography and biography, from whose conventions he consciously departs, he explains that, instead, he selects, shapes, and, in so doing, fictionalizes, his account to achieve effects beyond factual report. For example, the narrator emphasizes that he will not ‘fatigue the reader’ with uninteresting details of his school life, for ‘this is not an autobiography’ ([1907] 2009: 157); he stresses that ‘[i]t is not [his] business here to re-write the biographies of [his] parents,’ and that ‘this is not another memoir of public individuals, each of whom has had more than one biographer’ ([1907] 2009: 11). The repeated structure of negation has the effect to simultaneously evoke the cognitive frame then disavowed, so that readers arguably become the more aware of both the text’s elements of autobiography, biography, and memoir and of Gosse’s departure from these genres. The effect is increased through the syntactic parallelism of these phrases. The narrator adds an explanation of what he sees as his proper task, namely, to show not ‘the world’s side’ but ‘the other side, the novel/Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of’ ([1907] 2009: 12). These lines come from Robert Browning’s poem ‘One Word More,’ in which Browning distinguishes between ‘two soul-sides’—one ‘to face the world with’ and the other ‘to show a woman [one] loves’ ([1855] 1960: XVII.9–11). The world-side, as Browning continues, in his address to his wife, is there to be admired and praised, but he counts himself blessed to know the side that usually remains hidden from the world. The fact that Gosse uses words borrowed from a poem to show this ‘other side’ of his parents stylistically emphasizes that the aims pursued with Father and Son necessitate a recourse to fictional resources.

An intriguing comment in Gosse’s preface suggests that he is to some extent unaware of his own aims, or unwilling to explicitly present his autofictional strategy as such. Gosse first notes that ‘those who have written about the facts of their own childhood have usually delayed to note them down until age has dimmed their recollections’ ([1907] 2009: 3). A ‘common fault in such autobiographies’ is that they are ‘sentimental, and are falsified by self-admiration and self-pity’ ([1907] 2009: 3). In contrast, Gosse claims to write down recollections ‘while his memory is still perfectly vivid and while he is still unbiased by the forgetfulness or the sensibility of advancing years’ ([1907] 2009: 3). Memory is, of course, always constructive and generative—creative reconstruction rather than accurate recall. At the same time, Gosse’s account is more vivid than his memory can plausibly be. It is a fictionally (re-)created childhood perspective, entertainingly and insightfully intertwined with that of the adult who composes the text. Father and Son aptly emphasizes its fictional qualities, its ability to entertain, and its generalizable truths, but Gosse seems to feel the need to also present his text as an accurate mnemonic recall.

Despite the text’s hesitancy about explicitly presenting the autofictional mode of Father and Son as such, Gosse’s example reflects a development towards increasing autofictional awareness. He self-reflexively and critically engages with established generic conventions and starts to conceptualize an autofictional mode in relation to them. This development becomes yet more apparent if one compares his self-reflexivity and his formal experiments with those of Fielding. Fielding and Gosse both endow a personal account with general significance by means of, respectively, caricature and abstraction. Gosse adds stylistic and narratological experiments, such as the replacing of proper nouns by common nouns, definite noun phrases with possessive determiners, and by combining first- and third-person perspectives. Gosse’s stylistic and structural strategies for inviting and simultaneously complicating authorial attachment not only make his account more generally applicable, they also constitute an intentional innovation within the framework of auto/biographical narrative. His example thus takes us closer to the kind of grammatical and structural self-distancing, and to the at times playful self-splitting and self-multiplication, that will come to characterize much twentieth-century autofiction around the time of the term’s coinage.

3. Conclusion

Based on the premise that autofiction works with, but also pushes against, generic conventions of a given period, and that therefore even a single text can be studied for insights into developments in its contextual field, this article’s case study-based narratological and stylistic account of autofiction allows us to form tentative hypotheses about diachronic specificities, continuities, and transformations regarding how autofictional texts signal generic ambiguity and invite, but also obstruct, authorial attachment.

In Fielding’s Journal, distance between author and character emerges from stylistic exaggeration, abstraction, and irony, but there are no experiments with nouns, pronouns, or narrative perspective. Barrett Browning grammatically distances, but also aligns, author and heroine, and she does so by creating a fictional alter ego with its own proper noun (Aurora Leigh), whom she links to herself and to a larger collective of women through subtle pronoun ambiguation. In the case of Gosse, lack of names signals a self-portrait with applications, meanings, and values that reach beyond the individual life and person portrayed. Gosse neither invents names for fictional characters nor gives those of historical counterparts, but instead settles on the abstraction of common nouns and the zero determiner. Moreover—and in this respect Gosse is closest to the formal characteristics that several contemporary autofictional writers adopt in forms that make the mode’s experimental nature explicit—he works with a range of degrees and forms of pronoun distancing and attachment within the same text.

As regards self-reflexive commentary, Fielding’s Journal, Aurora Leigh, and Father and Son demonstrate that explicit engagement with genre categories is more common in some periods than in others, but also that the development is not linear. Fielding reflects on generic conventions while they are yet in the process of establishing themselves while Gosse does so after their formation, when they begin to be newly destabilized. Barrett Browning, writing in the intermediary period, chooses to subtly budge rather than directly confront generic expectations and conventions.

Over the course of the twentieth century, self-reflexive challenging of the genres of autobiography and novel becomes more dominant, as do structural and grammatical experiments in self-distancing. Gertrude Stein, for example, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), presents herself through a first-person narrative seemingly written by her partner, who, however, remains a peripheral figure in an account actually centered on Stein. In the decades around the emergence of autofiction as a critical term, postmodernism takes such grammatical experiments with self yet further. One might think, for example, of Brooke-Rose’s decision in Remake to write an autobiographical narrative without personal and possessive pronouns. Glancing ahead to the next turn of the century, it becomes apparent that, while formally experimental and self-reflexively metafictional autofictional forms continue with us, there also emerges a strand of autofiction with no, or very little, grammatical distancing and metacommentary. For example, texts like Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series (published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011) and Cusk’s Outline trilogy overall appear less concerned with genre categories, while no less creatively combining autobiographical and fictional forms. It seems most apt, therefore, to speak of a fluctuation across literary history in the degree to which autofictional texts are interested in explicitly engaging with categories of genre and autobiographical referentiality.

The stylistic and narratological developments charted in this article show that autofictional forms vary even where texts work towards similar effects. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Aurora Leigh, and Father and Son suggest that there is no form—function mapping in how the use of pronouns and names works to invite or eschew (full) authorial attachment. Neither affective or biographical links between author and character/narrator, nor distancing between these entities, nor indeed ambiguation of identity and ontological referentiality, depend on the use of the author’s name, the name of a character, or on first- or third-person narration. These examples make apparent that attempts to find definitional formal criteria for autofiction are ultimately doomed to failure. Autofictional texts establish their hybridity through a range of stylistic means, but all of these can also be used to different effects. Moreover, as the examples discussed in this article make apparent, one and the same textual feature can have different effects at different points in literary history. This means that analysis of autofictional style must always take place with an awareness of more general changes in generic conventions, but also that, if contextual and stylistic analysis is combined, we gain new insights into the workings of specific formal structures in autofictional texts, including into how autofiction works within a given period’s generic frameworks and contributes to their transformation.

I propose elsewhere (Effe 2025 fc; see also Effe and Lawlor, 2024) that in order to better understand autofiction in earlier periods, we need to pay attention also to context of production and reception, and together with Gibbons (Effe and Gibbons, 2022) suggest a similarly holistic approach also for contemporary autofiction. When an analysis of textual features is combined with a history-of-reading approach, it becomes easier to adduce other autofictional precursors from each period that share features with the ones described in this article and therefore constitute further confirmation for this article’s claims. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope, for example, similarly to Fielding, presents his poetry as autobiographical and as creatively crafted. Lawrence Sterne’s alter egos—Tristram and Yorick in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey—are already closer to Aurora Leigh. David Copperfield, written shortly before Barrett Browning’s poem, is another example of an autofictional Künstlerroman. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh, opts for named characters rather than the abstractions chosen by Gosse, but includes similar, and similarly tentative, generic self-reflexivity through the narrator’s comments on the self-revelatory powers of art.

The insights gained from this article’s exploration of formal and functional shifts in autofictional signals have implications for the study of diachronicity in language and literature more broadly. For example, contextual analysis, which, as this article has argued, is unavoidable for tracing diachronic developments in autofictionality, is needed also in studying other genres as well as linguistic changes across time. This is so in part because of the shared ‘problem’ in linguistics and literary studies that the form—function relationship of a given narrative strategy or stylistic feature does not necessarily remain constant between different historical periods. In some respects, linguistics is at an advantage when it comes to tracing formal and functional shifts, while in other respects literary studies is better equipped. On average, linguistics can make use of more and of larger corpora, and is better able to produce statistically relevant numerical findings, especially thanks to computational methods. Linguistics therefore perhaps more easily observes non-teleological changes. Due to its ability to draw on large electronic corpora, linguistics is also better at deductively confirming hypotheses, which in literary studies are in most cases formed inductively. On the other hand, a disadvantage of approaches common in linguistics is that corpora often work with excerpts and with only limited contextual information (on these limitations, and on how the Helsinki Corpus partially redresses them, see Diller, 2001: 23–26). ³ Case-based analysis and close reading as practiced in literary studies are better suited to considering language in context. Relatedly, such approaches are also better able to trace effects of a given strategy or structure in the context of production and reception.

Concerning present-day language use, linguistics, too, can study the effects of stylistic devices, for example through observation, interviews, or empirical studies, but this is more difficult for earlier periods. As Diller puts it in his introduction to an edited volume attempting to investigate the history of the English language by way of tracing developments in genres, registers, or text types: ‘[t]he native speakers of former stages of English, after all, are no longer with us, and the reconstruction of their intuitions concerning genre is a laborious process whose results will always be fraught with uncertainty’. Literary studies, on the other hand, can resort to reader comments, for example in reviews, and thus study historical developments regarding how forms are perceived. In addition, literary studies has the advantage that the kinds of texts it studies are often self-reflexive, commenting on current conventions in other (literary) texts, which is not the case for many text types studied in linguistics. In consequence, literary studies can analyze how a given text is in explicit dialogue with other texts from the literary landscape in which it participates. In this way, individual texts or small samples may be interpreted to point to contiguous changes in the larger field.

Arguably, dialogues across the disciplines—like the ones conducted in this special issue—are particularly promising. Such conversations bring to the fore diverse ways of collecting and analyzing data. They show the potential of stylistic approaches drawing on disciplinary foundations also from literary study, and vice versa, and in so doing promise to lead to new research procedures that will yield an overall more comprehensive understanding of diachronicity in language and literature.