Eliza Haywood’s Intrusive Practices from the Perspective of Feminist Narratology

Abstract

This article aims to interpret intrusive narrative passages in works of Eliza Haywood (1693-1756), one of the most prolific eighteenth-century British novelists, in terms of a new postclassical narratological project that came into being in the 1990s-feminist narratology. Employing the notion of the engaging narrator that was suggested by Robin Warhol (1986) enables us to trace dynamics of Haywood's creative literary experiments with intrusive digressions intended to reduce the narrator's distance to the extradiegetic narratee and establish intimate relations with him/her.