This doctoral dissertation, «The Retrospective Novel: The Romance of the Self,» focuses on the relationship between literary genres, ideology, and history. The novels I analyze are widely regarded as masterpieces of the last two centuries of Western literature. They include works by authors such as Melville, Conrad, Gide, Pirandello, Svevo, Roth, Faulkner, and Mann. All these novels present a biographical structure, in which the life of the protagonist is narrated retrospectively either by the hero himself (like in Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal) or by one of his friends (as in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus). The research aims to examine the relationship between the retrospectivity of these novels and the rise of modern bourgeois society. The goal is to define the retrospective novel as a genre that, by continuing the Romantic tradition, reacts to Western ideas of modernity and to the realist novel. The dissertation discusses the formal features of retrospective novels to investigate the relationship between the crisis of linear plots and the existence of tragic heroes. The analysis takes into consideration the tension between polyphony and monologism, the combination of essayism and narration, and the importance of a centralized moral point of view that questions the predominant moral discourse of society. The discussion of these formal aspects of retrospective novels lets emerge the craving for epic anti-bourgeois heroes that characterizes retrospective novels. By employing a novel theoretical framework, the dissertation aims to reappraise capital texts of the Western canon and to reevaluate the underestimated influence of Romanticism on the development of the modern Western novel.

The plot twist is a complex narrative surprise in which a revelation retroactively transforms readers’ understanding of the preceding events. Readers discover belatedly that the situation depicted in the narrative had all along been quite different from what they thought. Although the term “plot twist” was first used in the early twentieth century, many of the best-known works of fiction of the nineteenth century were revealed, in retrospect, to be twist narratives. This dissertation studies twist narratives and their readers in the period before the plot twist became a known device. Through case studies of Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the chapters investigate what kinds of knowledge-making practices readers engage in during first-time readings and rereadings of twist narratives, as well as before and after reading. Across these chapters I make the case that twist narratives demonstrate the crucial and interconnected roles of knowledge and temporality in any narrative experience. What we know, and when, and especially what we don’t (yet) know, is crucial to how narratives work and why we enjoy them.