Authorial intrusion as a technique of self-conscious narration in the English novel

Abstract

The use of authorial intrusion gives a self-conscious quality to the novel by underlining the distance between its fictional world and the real world from which the reader and the writer approach to that fiction. Eighteenth-century writers Sterne and Fielding have interrupted their narratives to comment on the action, characters, and the creative process of their novels. Thackeray and Trollope stand out with their use of the intrusive authorial narrator in the nineteenth century. A twentieth-century writer, John Fowles, comments extensively and systematically on the art of fiction writing as well as the role and functions of the writer by means of authorial intrusion in The French Lieutenant's Woman, which consequently appears as an example of metafiction.