Abstract:This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. Working across four central cases (Samuel Richardson’s “man of feeling” Sir Charles Grandison, Charlotte Smith’s self-effacing protagonist Lionel Desmond, Walter Scott’s… Show more
Set email alert for when this publication receives citations?
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.