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The Revelatory Narrative Circle in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

Imagine a novel related not by one, not by two, but by five narrators, all female, one dead. In novels written near the turn from the 20th to the 21st century, readers and scholars encounter a richness of new fictional tools, among them narratives like the one described above-Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (1998)-that depart both from traditional social views and from familiar literary forms. Ansgar Ntinning describes what he calls "revisionist historical novels," which have significantly extended the boundaries of the historical novel to include, among other elements, "the history of mentalities, women's history, oral history, history from below, and the history of everyday life" (362), often using narrative tools such as "several character-focalizers whose limited perspectives project highly subjective views of history" (363) to challenge conventions of the realist novel. Kristin Jacobsen's definition of "neodomestic fiction" describes a genre that "recycles the domestic novel in historically conscious ways that posit alternatives to the conventional white, middle-class home" (106). Narrative theory provides a valuable resource in achieving a useful critical reading of revisionist and neodomestic fiction. Bakhtin suggests the value of a "diversity of individual voices" in telling a story (262), and Foss and Griffin's concept of "invitational rhetoric" describes the effectiveness of a model in which each successive speaker offers a viewpoint, but also listens openly to those of all other speakers (5). Whereas a single,