ABSTRACT
From early European romances’ direct addresses to readers, to the “dear reader” of the most traditional English novel, to Sterne’s and other lateeighteenth-century writers’ illusionistic tricks of drawing readers into conversation with the narrator, metafi ctional experiments with apostrophe and second-person narration followed a rapid progression and extension of forms in their development up to the end of the twentieth century. By moving the reader’s focus away from the diegesis, or the story itself, to the extradiegesis, or the story’s telling, novelists emphasized that the narrator and reader themselves create the text through the very act of writing and reading. Pushing apostrophe to new limits, nineteenth-century authors like Hawthorne and Melville exploited second person further by creating indefi nite “you”-characters capable of performing actions in the diegetic story-world. The twentieth century, meanwhile, saw experiments with full-length “second-person fi ction,” introduced to American readers fi rst by writers like Georges Perec and Michel Butor, where “you” actually participate in the plot. What began as an experimental form was, by century’s end, popularized into the American mainstream perhaps fi rst by the translation of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, then by writers like Jay McInerney, Tom Robbins, Pam Houston, Lorrie Moore, and Melissa Bank. And while novels written entirely in second-person remained a limited genre, the potential for drawing the reader into the story quickly and seemingly directly made second person increasingly popular in introductions, where it was used to great effect by novelists like Russell Banks and Alice Walker.
