Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer (review)

Alan Palmer rightly observes that most existing studies of fiction do not discuss “The Social Mind” of fictional characters, although that concept enriches our understanding of the novel and contains vast heuristic potential for understanding other genres with narrative content, such as theater or film. His main examples, in path-breaking analyses of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, come from nineteenth-century British literature, but they should inspire studies in other areas.