From Dangerfield to Dickens: A Short History of Tense Alternation in the British Novel

abstract: The last two decades have seen an unprecedented surge in present- tense narration, transforming what has traditionally been considered an unconventional narrative strategy into a common narrative feature, no longer confined to literary experimentation. While the use of the present as a dominant tense of narration constitutes a new aesthetic trend in contemporary British fiction, the use of intermittent present-tense narration is far from new and can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Research on the use of tense in general, and tense alternation in particular, has focused mainly on medieval and early modern narrative as well as on (post)modern and contemporary fiction, neglecting the periods in between. This article aims to address this research gap, as it sets out to investigate patterns of tense alternation in British narrative (fiction) published between the late seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Examining the formal, structural, and functional dimensions of shifts between past and present tense in the work of representative authors such as Thomas Dangerfield, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens, the article distinguishes three prominent uses of the present tense encountered in novels published between the Restoration period and the Victorian era. These include the use of the conversational historical present in the picaresque novel, referential and metareferential uses of the present tense in novels that emphasize the notion of mediacy, and affective and immersive uses of present-tense narration that can be found in epistolary writing as well as in the Victorian realist novel.