Books in the Frontiers of Narrative series

First study of its kind to combine literary and narratological analysis with reference to linguistic terms and models.

How do writers represent cognition, and what can these representations tell us about how our own minds work? Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media is the first single-author book to explore these questions across media, moving from analyses of literary narratives in print to those found where so much cultural and artistic production occurs today - computer screens.

Focusing on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture provides a method for the analysis of salient transmedial strategies of narrative representation in contemporary films, comics, and videogames.

Explores the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or "the unnatural" throughout British and American literary history. Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory,and possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields for individual readers as well as literary culture.

A storyteller’s craft can often be judged by how convincingly the narrative captures the identity and personality of its characters. In this book, the characters who take center stage are “strange” first-person narrators: they are fascinating because of how they are at odds with what the reader would wish or expect to hear—while remaining reassuringly familiar in voice, interactions, and conversations. Combining literary analysis with research in cognitive and social psychology, Marco Caracciolo focuses on readers’ encounters with the “strange” narrators of ten contemporary novels, including Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Caracciolo explores readers’ responses to narrators who suffer from neurocognitive or developmental disorders, who are mentally disturbed due to multiple personality disorder or psychopathy, whose consciousness is split between two parallel dimensions or is disembodied, who are animals, or who lose their sanity.A foray into current work on reception, reader-response, cognitive literary study, and narratology, Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction illustrates why any encounter with a fictional text is a complex negotiation of interlaced feelings, thoughts, experiences, and interpretations.Marco Caracciolo is a postdoctoral researcher in the English department of the University of Freiburg in Germany. He is the author of The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach and the coauthor (with psychologist Russell Hurlburt) of A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science.

Globally, at least one in four women experiences domestic violence at some point in her life, according to World Bank figures, which are confirmed by local surveys throughout the world. Since domestic violence can cause both acute physical injuries and long-term chronic illness, an abused woman is likely to appeal to a family doctor or general practitioner as one of her first resources for help. General practitioners, however, rarely report domestic violence in their practices. Jarmila Mildorf’s interdisciplinary study makes a unique contribution to the fields of domestic abuse and narrative studies with her analysis of the narrative practices of doctors who treat abused women. Mildorf, a sociolinguist and literary scholar, analyzes the narrative trajectories, space-time parameters, agency, modalities, metaphors, and stereotypes in thirty-six narratives deriving from in-depth interviews with twenty general practitioners in Aberdeen, Scotland. Mildorf shows what these narrative strategies reveal about the perceptions and attitudes of practitioners toward domestic violence and the ways in which the narratives linguistically reconstruct knowledge and realities of domestic violence. Unique in its emphasis on the discourse of doctors, Storying Domestic Violence suggests the possibility of narrative approaches in medical modules that might preclude further stigmatization and victimization of abused women. A cross section of scholars will recognize this study as significant for its potential to change how people think about domestic abuse, physician-patient relations, and public health policy.

Autofiction, or works in which the eponymous author appears as a fictionalized character, represents a significant trend in postwar American literature, when it proliferated to become a kind of postmodern cliche. The Story of ""Me"" charts the history and development of this genre, analyzing its narratological effects and discussing its cultural implications.

In the beginning there was...the beginning. And with the beginning came the power to tell a story. Few book-length studies of narrative beginnings exist, and not one takes a feminist perspective. Opening Acts reveals the important role of beginnings as moments of discursive authority with power and agency that have been appropriated by writers from historically marginalized groups.

Tison Pugh looks at the intersection of narratology, ludology, and queer studies, providing a range of theoretical interpretive strategies for uncovering the queer potential of gaming texts and textual games while demonstrating the wide applicability of queer ludonarratology throughout the humanities.

By examining how some of the best fiction writers have taken up the challenge of film, television, video games, and hypertext, Daniel Punday offers an enlightening look into the current status of such fundamental narrative concepts as character, plot, and setting. Writing at the Limit explores what it really means to be writing at print's media limit.

Opens an intriguing perspective on how these works engage the legacy of postmodernism - its subversion, self-reflexivity, and moral contingency.

Optional-Narrator Theory makes a strong intervention in (or against) narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives.

Paul Ardoin asks how texts might work to unsettle readers at a moment when unwelcome information is rejected as fake news or rebutted with alternative facts.

George Eliot wrote that ""man cannot do without the make-believe of a beginning."" Beginnings, it turns out, can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres.

The study of narrative has been a continuous concern from antiquity to the present day because stories are everywhere - from fiction across media to nation building and personal identity. This title sorts out traditional narrative theories, providing the necessary skills to interpret any story that comes along.

The most accessible approach yet to children's literature and narrative theory, Telling Children's Stories is a comprehensive collection of never-before-published essays by an international slate of scholars that offers a broad yet in-depth assessment of narrative strategies unique to children's literature.

Time is a key aspect of narrative. It can advance a story, illuminate its role in our daily lives, and help us understand how events unfold. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Inderjeet Mani uses recent developments in linguistics and computer science to analyze the use of time in narrative form.

Reveals the rich possibilities for research along the nexus of narrative and mind

How and why do readers attribute an ethos (of, for example, sincerity, reliability, authority, or irony) to literary characters, narrators, and even to authors? Are there particular conditions under which it is more appropriate for interpreters to attribute an ethos to authors, rather than to narrators? This book proposes to such questions.

Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory.

Reveals how both immigrant European and modern Native communities and individuals use oral and written narratives to define and centre themselves in time and space. This work provides a fresh understanding of Western literature and culture, and encourages a reconsideration of the formation and modern character of the American West.

Argues that narrative is simultaneously a cognitive style, a discourse genre, and a resource for writing. Because stories are strategies that help humans make sense of their world, narratives not only have a logic but also are a logic in their own right, providing an irreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience.

Jarmila Mildorf's study makes a unique contribution to the fields of domestic abuse and narrative studies with her analysis of the narrative practices of doctors who treat abused women. Mildorf analyses the narrative trajectories, space-time parameters, agency, modalities, metaphors, and stereotypes in 36 narratives deriving from in-depth interviews with general practitioners in Aberdeen.

Everywhere you turn today, someone is talking to you - the television, the radio, cell phones, your computer. If you think some of the novels and stories you read are talking to you too, you're not alone. This book reads contemporary fiction as a form of conversation and as part of the larger conversation that is modern culture.

An exploration of why humans are drawn to fictional stories through the application of evolution theory and cognitive science