Alex, you only need to read Jane Austen. She invented it.

James Woods' How Fiction Works is a very good exploration.

Emma

Ooo, I loved 'Gone to Soldiers', Emma - I cried buckets.

I have always used third person and free indirect style, and have ranged from just doing all one POV (TTOL), through two (CW) to five main ones pus some little bits of other people (H&M). Curiously, I seem to be narrowing down. If you count MTLL (which was epistolary, so I suppose counts as multiple first person?) as multi-viewpoint (there were letters from all kinds of people), then I have gone (i) multiple (ii) five main ones (iii) two, (iv) one.

For my WIP I have gone back to two third person viewpoints (basically one, but with flashes of a counter-voice).

I don't think there are any rules about a maximum number of PsOV, at all. You just need to write and experiment and see what feels right for the story you want to tell.

Rosy x

Deb

Assuming that all these points of view are needed, then whenever I'm wondering on questions of technique, I sometimes find it clears my head to read some of the books that have done what I'm trying to do: Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has multiple first-person points of view (as does Swift's Last Orders, which is influenced by the Faulkner). The overall effect is of a community speaking in a single, mangled, brilliant voice.

In fact, as I'm thinking of doing something similar, I'm currently reading a (very good) debut with multiple points of view, all in third-person, free-indirect - American Rust by Philipp Meyer. He shifts between voices with great confidence.

And the large middle-section of Bolano's The Savage Detectives took this multiple points of view to some sort of extreme - maybe a hundred different characters with something to say, with everything revealing something about the 'protagonist' (whom we never see). It's exhilirating, but it did make my head hurt.