Introduction : the place of narratology in the historical study of eighteenth-century literature -- The eighteenth-century challenge to narrative theory -- Formalism and historicity reconciled in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones -- Perspective and focalization in eighteenth-century descriptions -- Temporality in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe -- Temporality, subjectivity and the representation of characters in the eighteenth-century novel: from Defoe's Moll Flanders to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre -- Authorial narration reconsidered: Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, Anonymous' Charlotte Summers, and the problem of authority in the mid-eighteenth-century novel -- Problems of tellability in German eighteenth-century criticism and novel-writing -- Immediacy: the function of embedded narratives in Wieland's Don Sylvio -- The tension between idea and narrative form: the example as a narrative structure in Enlightenment literature -- 'Speaking well of the dead': characterization in the early modern funeral sermon -- The use of paratext in popular eighteenth-century biography: the case of Edmund Curll -- Peritextual disposition in French eighteenth-century narratives.

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This collection of essays studies the encounter between allegedly ahistorical concepts of narratology and eighteenth-century literature. It questions whether the general concepts of narratology are as such applicable to historically specific fields, or whether they need further specification. Furthermore, at issue is the question whether the theoretical concepts actually are, despite their appearance of ahistorical generality, derived from the historical study of a particular period and type of literature. In the essays such concepts as genre, plot, character, event, tellability, perspective, temporality, description, reading, metadiegetic narration, and paratext are scrutinized in the context of eighteenth-century texts. The writers include some of the leading theorists of both narratology and eighteenth-century literature.

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