Abstract: Using Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), I delineate a narrative form that I call the interpersonal field: a web of relations that forms when a real narrative world purports to stand independent of the narrative that conjures it. I provide a theoretical and historical account of the interpersonal field and the two fictions crucial to it: the substantive character, who purports to transcend its textual instantiations; and the local narrator, who disclaims creative control over the narrative world. The resulting narratives are fluid zones of engagement, to which readers can bring diverse kinds of balance and coherence.
Alexander Scott Buckley (Mon,) studied this question.