How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

By character emblems, Foster refers to concrete objects or traits associated with a character that symbolize abstract ideas about them. Novelists frequently use character emblems to signify the themes associated with the characters. For instance, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), flowers—the protagonist’s dominant character emblem—illustrate the themes of impermanence and a brief springtime in the mundaneness of life. In addition, character emblems serve as mnemonic devices, helping readers instantly recall a character, like the memorable names in the works of Charles Dickens.

Coined by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogism is the idea that meaning is created not by a single source but by the continuous dialogue between different sources and voices. According to Bakhtin, the “dialogic potential of a novel” (220) implies that novels have the capacity to carry on a conversation in the sense that they constantly call out to each other through references and echoes or allusions. Foster uses Bakhtin’s term to refer to the influence that novels exert on each other across time, contending that even adaptations talk to their predecessors, since they force readers to reassess the original work.