Oral and written modes in the first-person retrospective English novel, 1700-1900

The article answers Monica Fludernik's call for developing diachronic narratology for which the author suggests a more suitable term in the framework of Russian tradition - historical narratology. This branch of narrative theory considers, among others, the issues of emergence, development and refunctionalization of certain narrative categories and techniques over time. From discourse linguistics the author adapts the term "mode" to describe the differences between presenting the story in a novel in the form of a written document or an oral account - a feature which is sadly neglected by scholars of literature. The article is an attempt to trace various modifications of oral and written modes in the British novel across the period of late 17th - 19th centuries. The limitations for the research are the following: the novels are written in the first person, this person is a diegetic narrator, and there is a pronounced retrospective component in the novel. The two modes are seen as poles of a continuum within which it is still possible to differentiate between four types of modal relations: the predominance of the oral mode, the predominance of the written mode, the neutralized mode, and the dual mode. The predominance of the oral mode in a novel is comparatively rare and usually accompanies exotic, adventurous or fantastic storylines (Behn, Reid, Wells). It functions as a medium connecting the reader to the fictional world by modeling aural communication that "dissolves" the physical written text. On the contrary, the written mode materializes the fictional world into the text of the book. This allows the reader to perceive the story as a part of his primary reality. Early English novel almost exclusively resorts to the written mode by imitating the forms of memoirs, diaries and letters (Defoe, Swift, Richardson and others). There are some examples of the neutralization of modes in the Victorian age (Charlotte and Ann Bronte, Dickens), i.e. the reader cannot form a stable opinion of whether the story is fixed in any document or is narrated orally. The author attributes this to the Realist strategy. The dual mode, when the features of both modes are combined in the same novel, can be traced across the studied period (Sterne, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte). It seems to be a productive technique for the evolvement of the novel as a genre. At the same time its analysis helps to highlight both the writer's artistic idiosyncrasies and the period's tendencies. The author concludes with the hypothesis of the emergence of another, mental, mode which reflects the processes of memory and remembrance as they appear in the narrator consciousness. It buds already in David Copperfield and blossoms in the 20th-century novel. Tuning the suggested typology by taking into account all three modes and the novels beyond the 19th century is the prospect of the research.

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