Metalepsis and Historical Temporalities: A Contribution to Diachronic Narratology

ABSTRACT: This article offers a novel historical conception of metalepsis—a narrative device defined as the deliberate transgression of the boundary between the world of the telling and the world of the told. Narratologists have developed a fine-grained typology of metalepsis, in which types are seen as resulting from universals of narrative logic. Analyzing Anglophone and Russophone texts from the 1850s to 1960s, I show that these types are not transhistorical, but are constrained and enabled by specific conceptions of spatiotemporal reality. My approach reveals where structural types come from, and why they are culturally significant. The methodological contribution of the article is to show how structures articulated in the language of narratology can be translated into that of the history of ideas. In this I am contributing to the development of diachronic narratology—a priority for the field as it advances methodological exchange between the rigorous description of narrative structures and historical investigations of literature. I show how this effort can be furthered by integrating the study of narrative with the history of temporal discourses, a subject that has been studied in depth by historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists.