DescriptionThis dissertation examines the development of focalization as it occurs in urban narratives over the course of the British eighteenth century, specifically urban observer narratives which foreground modal shifts between external and internal perspectives, which, in the words of cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker, "objectify" an otherwise peripheral observer. Drawing from a range of literary genres that include early urban satires, periodicals by Edward Ward and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, prints by William Hogarth, and novels by Frances Burney and Jane Austen, my dissertation situates narratological innovations in focalization within a broader history of ideas - that of phenomenological inquiry. I argue that eighteenth-century urban narratives offer an alternative to contemporaneous empiricist epistemologies, which model perception as fundamentally passive and disembodied, by modeling phenomenological concerns such as active perception, delimited attention, pre-reflective consciousness, social attunement, and everyday being-in-the-world.