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The connection between speech and writing in human language has been a matter of philosophical debate since antiquity. By plumbing the depths of this complex relationship, Tony E. Jackson explains how the technology of alphabetic writing has determined the nature of the modern novel. --- Through striking new readings of works by Austen, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Forster, Woolf, Lessing, and McEwan, Jackson reveals how the phenomena of speech and storytelling interact with the technological characteristics of writing.

He also explains how those interactions induced the generic changes in the novel from its eighteenth-century beginnings to postmodernism and beyond. His claims, grounded in a contemporary understanding of human cognitive capacities and constraints, offer a fresh interpretive approach to all written literature.