Afhalen na 1 uur in een winkel met voorraad
Gratis thuislevering in België vanaf € 30
Ruim aanbod met 7 miljoen producten

Afhalen na 1 uur in een winkel met voorraad
Gratis thuislevering in België vanaf € 30
Ruim aanbod met 7 miljoen producten

Winkels

Verlanglijstje

Winkels

Verlanglijstje

Zoeken

Volg ons op

140 winkels

Wist je dat er in Vlaanderen voor iedereen een Standaard Boekhandel is binnen een straal van 7 km?

Vind hier een winkel

€ 124,45

+ 248 punten

Uitvoering

Pre-order nu, verschijnt op 08/09/2026

Eenvoudig bestellen

Veilig betalen

Gratis thuislevering vanaf € 30 (via bpost)

Gratis levering in je Standaard Boekhandel

Omschrijving

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--words enclosed in quotation marks that appear to be the exact utterances of characters--shapes our understanding of fictional characters and the social worlds they inhabit. Combining computational tools and close literary analysis, Menon reinstates direct speech to its rightful place in narrative theory, worthy of the critical seriousness afforded to such other features of narrative as free indirect discourse.

After quantifying direct speech in nearly one thousand British novels written between 1789 and 1901, Menon turns her attention to several canonical nineteenth-century works of fiction by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. She considers, among other things, the ways that Austen establishes sympathy for certain characters through her allotment of speech; the narrative significance of speaking characters not given proper names in Jane Eyre; and the social isolation of Dorothea in Middlemarch, as revealed by speech networks. Menon shows not only how the study of direct speech allows us to make new arguments about these well-known texts but also that data analysis of speech can change the way we think about characters, individual novels, and even genres.