SUB VOCE: VOICE AND THE POETICS OF INDIRECTION IN FLAUBERT, GEORGE ELIOT AND VERGA

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of voice in nineteenth-century fiction through a consideration of the modality known as Free Indirect Discourse (FID), seeking to identify the formal implications of the indeterminacy of FID.;Taking Bakhtin/Volosinov's and Derrida's discourse theories as its point of departure, the dissertation argues for the centrality of FID to the functioning of narrative discourse. Because FID operates contextually, its functioning has a significant bearing on the narrative macrocosm; narrative discourse, which speaks through other voices, is governed not by the authoritative voice of monologue but by the plurivocality of dialogue.;The four critical methodologies--stylistic, mimetic, linguistic, dialogical--which have sought to account for the functioning of FID are examined in the first chapter. Of these four, the dialogical, as elaborated by Bakhtin/Volosinov, provides, in its key concepts of dialogism, carnivalisation and heteroglossia, the theoretical foundation for the analyses made of novels by Flaubert, George Eliot and Verga.;The object of the readings in the following chapters is to establish the texts' formal ambiguities in relation to the functioning of FID within those texts. In "Flaubert's Graffiti: Citation and Combination in Madame Bovary," FID provides the focus for an analysis of the rupture between utterance and origin. "Middlemarch and the Equivocation of Voice" discusses the doubling of narrative voices, such that the formal structure of that novel duplicates that of FID, its discourse and its story contained within a single, paradoxical utterance. "Visible Speech: I Malavoglia" probes the opposition which FID foregrounds between speaking and writing.;In its simplest guise, FID is a form of literary ventriloquism whereby the narrator speaks through the voice of a character. The modality thus occupies a mid-range between direct and indirect discourse; partaking of both but reducible to neither, neither pure discourse nor pure story, it raises critical issues of fundamental importance to the novel's formal status.