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Critical Histories Of Omniscience, Rachel Buurma

Rachel S Buurma

This chapter of New Directions in the History of the Novel tells the story of the literary-critical invention of the Victorian novel’s narrative omniscience. Beginning with Victorian reviewers’ references to novelistic omniscience, the essay moves through early versions of narrative omniscience penned by post-Jamesian novel theorists and critics, who saw the talkative, inartistic, “omniscient author” as inessential to the novel and excluded it from their accounts of novelistic form. It marks a major shift in the 1960s, when the Anglo-American tradition began to see omniscience as formal and central to the Victorian novel’s form, tracing this shift through Foucauldian “panoptic …