Books by Mark Currie

A deceptively simple fable featuring a man unlike any other who proudly presents himself to the world in search of love and acceptance.The book is thought-provoking and motivational, incorporating simple black and white illustrations to highlight an essential truth about human nature. In this case, it is the truth that we are fascinated by things that are different. But also suspicious or afraid of them. The Man Who Was Different hints at the perils of being the one who is different, or set apart, from the rest of the group.Put another way, its message is very simple; just be yourself.An original story, written, illustrated and designed by Mark Currie.Format: Hardback A5 (148 x 210mm) case laminate. 48 pages. 24 black & white illustrations.

Focusing on surprise, spontaneous eruption and the unforeseeable, The Unexpected argues that stories help us to reconcile what we expect with what we experience. Though narrative is often understood a recapitulation of past events, the book argues that the unexpected and the future anterior, a future that is already complete, are guiding ideas for new understandings of the reading process. It also points beyond that to some of the key temporal concepts of our epoch, of unpredictability, the event, the untimely and the messianic. The Unexpected is an important intervention in narratology and a striking general argument about the cultural significance of surprise. The enquiry is developed by a range of new readings in philosophy and theory, as well as of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending.

How have developments in literary and cultural theory transformed our understanding of narrative? What has happened to narrative in the wake of poststructuralism? What is the role and function of narrative in the contemporary world? In this revised, updated and expanded new edition of an established text, Mark Currie explores these central questions and guides students through the complex theories that have shaped the study of narrative in recent decades. Postmodern Narrative Theory, Second Edition:* establishes direct links between the workings of fictional narratives and those of the non-fictional world* charts the transition in narrative theory from its formalist beginnings, through deconstruction, towards its current concerns with the social, cultural and cognitive uses of narrative* explores the relationship between postmodern narrative and postmodern theory more closely* presents detailed illustrative readings of known literary texts such as Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and now features a new chapter on Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man.Approachable and stimulating, this is an essential introduction for anyone studying postmodernism, the theory of narrative or contemporary fiction.

Why have theorists approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect? Mark Currie argues that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future are vital for an understanding of narrative and its effects in the world. In a series of arguments and readings, he offers an account of narrative as both anticipation and retrospection, linking fictional time experiments (in Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift) to exhilarating philosophical themes about presence and futurity. This is an argument that shows that narrative lies at the heart of modern experiences of time, structuring the present, whether personal or collective, as the object of a future memory as much as it records the past.

This text contains sections covering the definition of metafiction, historiographic metafiction and the writer and critic. It includes selected readings of metafiction.