Studies in the Novel

Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative that disrupt the illusion of fictional truth to varying degrees. In this way, intrusions highlight by contrast our sense of two formative elements of the novel: its narrative structure, and its referential status. This article argues that the historically variable types and functions of authorial commentary, together with their critical reception, provide an important means for investigating changing concepts of novelistic realism. It traces a broad terminological shift, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in which the common rhetorical practice of digression, or turning away from a narrative, came to be characterized as an intrusion into a narrative. In doing so, it demonstrates the paradoxical role authorial commentary has played in both establishing and challenging the conventions of realist fiction in relation to eighteenth-century theories of probability, nineteenth-century theories of sympathy, and twentieth-century theories of impersonality.