Point of View and Embodiment Revisited

Prompted by the popularity of contemporary autofiction, this article revisits instances of authorial self-reference in eighteenth-century fiction. These, the author argues, are better understood, like their contemporary counterparts, as vehicles of and reflections upon experiences of embodiment rather than as problems of reference per se. Indeed, brief examples of both first- and third-person expressions of the embodiment of narrators, characters, readers, and authors suggest that point of view may not be the settled matter of fictional form that narrative theory and the history of the novel have led us to suppose—at least in the eighteenth century. Point of view is worth revisiting as independent of reference, which dominates accounts of fictionality, because it registers and shapes the more-than- and less-than-human experience of fiction then as well as now, even as the conditions for reading and writing have changed.