We can read the history of characte

We can read the history of characterization as a series of responses to this problem of textual position and objects. As Lynch makes clear, the essential means by which physicality is imagined and worked through in the eighteenth century is by associating the printed text with a face. The bodies within texts thus become a means of negotiating the legibility of the textual artifact—both in terms of the philosophy of reading that it suggests, and through the opportunities that it allows for writers to manipulate reading through the characters that they describe. Lynch provides an example of the manipulation of character embodiment in Fielding’s and Smollett’s novels that suggests the links between this particular image of the marked body and the central issues of narrative authority that McKeon suggested at the outset. Lynch notes a fact familiar to most readers of eighteenth-century comic narrative—that frequently there is a strong distinction between heavily embodied peripheral or supporting characters, and relatively disembodied main characters: