You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The collection showcases new research in the field of cultural and historical narratology. Starting from the premise of the ‘semantisation of narrative forms’ (A. Nünning), it explores the cultural situatedness and historical transformations of narrative, with contributors developing new perspectives on key concepts of cultural and historical narratology, such as unreliable narration and multiperspectivity. The volume introduces original approaches to the study of narrative in culture, highlighting its pivotal role for attention, memory, and resilience studies, and for the imagination of crises, the Anthropocene, and the Post-Apocalypse. Addressing both fictional and non-fictional narratives, individual essays analyze the narrative-making and unmaking of Europe, Brexit, and the Postcolonial. Finally, the collection features new research on narrative in media culture, looking at the narrative logic of graphic novels, picture books, and newsmedia.
Narrative Research has developed into an international and interdisciplinary field. This volume collects fifteen essays which look at narrative and narrativity from various perspectives, including literary studies and hermeneutics, cognitive theory and creativity research, metaphor studies, and film theory and intermediality
This book addresses itself to the concept of the implied author, which has been the cause of controversy in cultural studies for some fifty years. The opening chapters examine the introduction of the concept in Wayne C. Booth’s "Rhetoric of Fiction" and the discussion of the concept in narratology and in the theory and practice of interpretation. The final chapter develops proposals for clarifying or replacing the concept.
At times of crisis and revolution such as ours, diagnoses of crucial junctures and ruptures – ‘turning points’ – in the continuous flow of history are more prevalent than ever. Analysing literary, cinematic and other narratives, the volume seeks to understand the meanings conveyed by different concepts of turning points, the alternative concepts to which they are opposed when used to explain historical change, and those contexts in which they are unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions. Literature and film in particular stress the importance of turning points as a sensemaking device (as part of a character’s or a community’s cultural memory), while at the same time unfolding the constructive and hence relative character of turning points. Offering complex reflections on the notion of turning points, literary and filmic narratives are thus of particular interest to the present volume.
This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.
Taking as its point of departure Nelson Goodman's theory of symbol systems as delineated in his seminal book «Ways of Worldmaking», this volume gauges the possibilities and perspectives offered by the worldmaking approach as a model for the study of culture. The volume serves to demonstrate how specific media and narratives affect the worlds that are created, and shows how these worlds are established as socially relevant. It also illustrates the extent to which ways of worldmaking are imbued with cultural values, and thus inevitably implicated in power relations.
“What Is Narratology?” sees itself as contributing to the intensive international discussion and controversy on the structure and function of narrative theory. The 14 papers in the volume advance proposals for determining the object of narratology, modelling its concepts and characterising its status within cultural studies.
This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. The different articles in this collection approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a detailed reading of literary texts. By addressing questions concerning the functions, characteristics and types of unreliability, this collection contributes to the current theoretical debate about unreliable narration. At the same time, the collection highlights the different uses to which unreliability has been put in different contexts, poetical traditions and literary movements. It does so by tracing the unreliable first-person narrator in a var...
By redefining established topics of narratology, research has become highly diversified. The contributions to this volume neither synthesize developments nor work from shared postulates, but represent a fresh look at ongoing issues. Some scrutinize focalisation in a linguistic framework or in a poststructuralist vein; others take on reliable and unreliable narration in a pronominal perspective or the "unaddressed" reader who upsets the tidy schemes of narrative communication. Also outlined are a possible worlds approach to narrative time, a systematic treatment of metanarrative and a transgeneric application of narratology to poetry. The sequential ordering of narratives as a way of controlling reader response is examined in one article and in another is seen to elicit intertextual configurations. Both divergent and complementary, the contributions seek to integrate into narratological categories and methods the dynamic processes of narrative itself.
Bringing together innovative and internationally renowned experts, this volume provides concise presentations of the main concepts and cutting-edge research fields in the study of culture (rather than the infinite multitude of possible themes). More specifically, the volume outlines different models for the study of culture, explores avenues for interdisciplinary exchange, assesses key concepts and traces their travels across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts. To trace the travelling of concepts means to map both their transfer from one discipline, approach or culture of research to another, and also to identify the transformations which emerge through these processes of...