Chapter 9 focuses on paratext from the eighteenth century to Victorian novels, highlighting the revival of omniscience in twenty-first-century storytelling before taking a technological leap to hypertext. Building on theories put forward by specialists of the field, it shows to what extent the notion of ‘interactivity’ and the reader’s higher implication in the creative process in digital fiction as opposed to print fiction need to be narratologically and pragmatically qualified. As the reader is strongly invited to (virtually) perform the action mentioned in the hyperlink by clicking on it if the story is to go on at all, the reference model (of Chapter 1) is tested and adapted to foreground the limits but also the potentialities of digital art. In response to Warhol’s distinction (1986, 1989, 1995) between ‘engaging’ and ‘distancing’ narrators, Chapter 9 also proposes a new model of implication in fiction, taking the perspective of actual readers. Given their degree of engagement and immersion in the narrative addressed to ‘you’, distinctions between ‘engaged’, ‘distanced’ and ‘immersed’ readers are suggested in a flexible model allowing for intermediate positioning.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

I argue that a traditional Jewish conception of God should be that of a perfectly good being. This follows from the demand for our maximal love of God. A perfectly good being must have a perfectly good character and need have power and knowledge only to the degree needed to express its perfectly good character. It need not be omnipotent or omniscient. It would be eternal and creator and sustainer of the world. It is an open question whether God must be a metaphysically necessary being.

In nineteenth-century Britain, a new relationship developed between eating and reading: the cookbook emerged as a commercial form; realist novelists described meals in detail; written menus appeared on dining tables in both the public and domestic spheres. The fashion in dining style also shifted, from service à la Française, in which dishes were all served at once, to service à la Russe, in which meals were served to diners in courses. Dinner had become serialized. As this chapter reminds us, Victorians consumed much of their literature in serial form, and now mealtimes mirrored the apportioned, segregated, and suspenseful qualities of serialized fiction. Because service à la Russe was timed and choreographed by servants, the serialization of the meal played a role in the privatization of social and libidinal life. This chapter also traces nineteenth-century interests in civilized and uncivilized ways of eating, and the crucial role that diet and dining played in political protest. Industrialization had produced an era of grand excess and grisly deficits; when Charles Dickens compared capitalist and cannibal appetites he exposed the end-logic of consumer culture.