Uncertain boundaries dispositive techniques in Prévost\u27s novels

This thesis examines the relationship between part and whole in novels by Antoine François Prévost to question the modern assumption that prototypical novelistic narrative structure and dispositive structure (chapters, books, volumes, parts, installments, etc.) share the same points of articulation. In Prévost’s day, the combination of the unpredictable rhythm of publication in installments and the ever-present possibility of continuation made it difficult for authors and readers to identify a novel’s definitive conclusion. This uncertainty led to tension between a novel’s concrete parts and its imagined narrative whole, and that tension created what I have termed a segmentary esthetic that stands in contrast to both the more regularly serialized novels of the nineteenth century and to more recent single-installment novels. To support these hypotheses, I first investigate schemas of interaction between dispositive structure and narrative structure in Prévost’s novels that differ from modern formal expectations: pseudoworks (works-within-works) and narrative units that cross dispositive boundaries in the Mémoires d’un homme de qualité and the Voyages de Robert Lade, and interrupted publication and unauthorized continuation in Cleveland and Mémoires d’un honnête homme. I then identify similar interactions in two of Prévost’s more formally modern novels La Jeunesse du Commandeur and Histoire d’une Grecque moderne. This study shows that unstable boundaries can be compatible with compositional sophistication, and outlines a new method of analysis that can be applied to narrative fiction from other periods and in other media