A novel or piece of writing in the first person isn’t what I mean. The Bergsonian sensational or inner time and the innovation of stream of consciousness built out of that philosophy – itself a late blossoming of Romanticism – is part of it, but not all of it. Chiefly I think it is writing where the chief concern is the inner life of the narrator.
This wouldn’t include writing where the chief concern is the inner life of the protagonist, where that is different from the narrator.
Reading starting Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, helped crystallise this thought. Although Malaparte is the main character, it is a book that is interested in the world. A book like The Baudelaire Fractal is interested in the inner development of the narrator, of the consequences of an event. It is not really dramatic.
Why there is so much of it may need to form the substance of another post. Relying entirely on Wyndham Lewis’ Time and Western Man you might say it’s something to do with the media we consume – like television. But I need to think more widely on this.