Abstrakt:
The paper is based on preliminary research conducted for the purposes of a PhD dissertation, the general focus of which is the negotiation of personal/social identity in three selected British novels. Here I discuss the sociolinguistic aspects of introducing the protagonist. The fictional identities are analysed as constructed by the characters themselves in their immediate textual environments. Thus the traditional assumption of a one-to-one and non-complex relationship between speech and speaker is challenged and the concept of authenticity is understood rather as a second-order phenomenon as opposed to the long-established consolidated notion of “primary” authenticity (Coupland 2003).
