6 - Documenticity I

Summary

The artifacts examined in this and the following chapter are “document” novels: starting in the late seventeenth century, novelists pretend their works were written by the protagonists themselves, chiefly in the form of memoirs or letters. Examining memoirs and other non-epistolary document novels, this chapter shows a clear process of isomorphism, as first-person documents come to resemble each other as they become more popular. The chapter also demonstrates that while the use of the first person was much more abundant in the seventeenth-century novel than typically acknowledged, that first person was not written but voiced (characters told their own stories to others). As such, there is no continuity between the dominant first-person technologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.