Silence as Dialogic Refusal: Deliberate Failures of Verbal Responding in English Fiction between 1660 and 1850

ABSTRACT: Punning on Robyn Warhol’s term narrative refusals (“Narrative Refusals,” “What Might Have Been”), this essay focuses on what I call dialogic refusals , namely instances of interlocutors in novels refusing to answer or respond. I present a survey of the range of refusal formulas in two periods of English literature (1600– 1750, 1800–1850), sketching developments in the quantity and variation of such explicit depictions of questions, remarks, or verbal summons that are met by silence. The research is based on the LION (Literature Online) database.