Download or read book Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth Century First Person Novel written by Elke D'hoker and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 variety of texts from Dutch, German, American, British, French, Italian, Polish, Danish and Argentinean literature. In this way, this volume significantly extends the traditional ‘canon’ of narrative unreliability. This collection combines essays from some of the foremost theoreticians of unreliability (James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning) with essays from experts in different national traditions. The result is a collection that approaches the ‘case’ of narrative unreliability from a new and more varied perspective.

Download or read book Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology written by Alice Bell and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of possible worlds has played a decisive role in postclassical narratology by awakening interest in the nature of fictionality and in emphasizing the notion of world as a source of aesthetic experience in narrative texts. As a theory concerned with the opposition between the actual world that we belong to and possible worlds created by the imagination, possible worlds theory has made significant contributions to narratology. Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology updates the field of possible worlds theory and postclassical narratology by developing this theoretical framework further and applying it to a range of contemporary literary narratives. This volume systematically outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the possible worlds approach, provides updated methods for analyzing fictional narrative, and profiles those methods via the analysis of a range of different texts, including contemporary fiction, digital fiction, video games, graphic novels, historical narratives, and dramatic texts. Through the variety of its contributions, including those by three originators of the subject area--Lubomír Doležel, Thomas Pavel, and Marie-Laure Ryan--Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology demonstrates the vitality and versatility of one of the most vibrant strands of contemporary narrative theory.

Download or read book Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness written by Vera Nünning and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the phenomenon known as “unreliable narration” or “narrative unreliability” has received a lot of attention during the last two decades, narratological research has mainly focused on its manifestations in narrative fiction, particularly in homodiegetic or first-person narration. Except for film, forms and functions of unreliable narration in other genres, media and disciplines have so far been relatively neglected. The present volume redresses the balance by directing scholarly attention to disciplines and domains that narratology has so far largely ignored. It aims at initiating an interdisciplinary approach to, and debate on, narrative unreliability, exploring unreliable narration in a broad range of literary genres, other media and non-fictional text-types, contexts and disciplines beyond literary studies. Crossing the boundaries between genres, media, and disciplines, the volume acknowledges that the question of whether or not to believe or trust a narrator transcends the field of literature: The issues of (un)reliability and (un)trustworthiness play a crucial role in many areas of human life as well as a wide spectrum of academic fields ranging from law to history, and from psychology to the study of culture.

Download or read book Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction written by Per Krogh Hansen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings narratology has incorporated a communicative model of literary narratives, considering these as simulations of natural, oral acts of communication. This approach, however, has had some problems with accounting for the strangeness and anomalies of modern and postmodern narratives. As many skeptics have shown, not even classical realism conforms to the standard set by oral or ‘natural’ storytelling. Thus, an urge to confront narratology with the difficult task of reconsidering a most basic premise in its theoretical and analytical endeavors has, for some time, been undeniable. During the 2000s, Nordic narratologists have been among the most active and insistent critics of the communicative model. They share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using ‘natural’ narratives as a model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for all of them, the distinction of fiction is of vital importance. This anthology presents a collection of new articles that deal with strange narratives, narratives of the strange, or, more generally, with the strangeness of fiction, and even with some strange aspects of narratology.

Download or read book Twenty First Century Fiction written by Peter Boxall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament – one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

Download or read book Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries written by Timo Müller and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasing specialization within the discipline of English and American Studies has shifted the focus of scholarly discussion toward theoretical reflection and cultural contexts. These developments have benefitted the discipline in more ways than one, but they have also resulted in a certain neglect of close reading. As a result, students and researchers interested in such material are forced to turn to scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s, much of which relies on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook aims to fill this gap by providing new readings of texts that figure prominently in the literature classroom and in scholarly debate − from James’s The Ambassadors to McCarthy’s The Road. These readings do not revert naively to a time “before theory.” Instead, they distil the insights of literary and cultural theory into concise introductions to the historical background, the themes, the formal strategies, and the reception of influential literary texts, and they do so in a jargon-free language accessible to readers on all levels of qualification.

Download or read book Narrative Reliability Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel written by Marta Puxan-Oliva and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does racial ideology contribute to the exploration of narrative voice? How does narrative (un)reliability help in the production and critique of racial ideologies? Through a refreshing comparative analysis of well-established novels by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, Albert Camus and Alejo Carpentier, this book explores the racial politics of literary form. Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel contributes to the emergent attention in literary studies to the interrelation of form and politics, which has been underexplored in narrative theory and comparative racial studies. Bridging cultural, postcolonial, racial studies and narratology, this book brings context specificity and awareness to the production of ideological, ambivalent narrative texts that, through technical innovation in narrative reliability, deeply engage with extremely violent episodes of colonial origin in the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, and the French and Spanish Caribbean. In this manner, the book reformulates and expands the problem of narrative reliability and highlights the key uses and production of racial discourses so as to reveal the participation of experimental novels in early and mid-20th century racial conflicts, which function as test case to display a broad, new area of study in cultural and political narrative theory.

Download or read book The Noah Myth in Twenty First Century Cli Fi Novels written by Helen E. Mundler and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaks new ground by analyzing four recent rewritings of the Noah myth not just as ideological statements but as literary artifacts and by contextualizing them within the wider crises of the Anthropocene.

Download or read book Jacqueline Wilson written by Lucy Pearson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 20 years, Jacqueline Wilson has published well over 100 titles and has become firmly established in the landscape of Children's Literature. She has written for all ages, from picture books for young readers to young adult fiction and tackles a wide variety of controversial topics, such as child abuse, mental illness and bereavement. Although she has received some criticism for presenting difficult and seemingly 'adult' topics to children, she remains overwhelmingly popular among her audience and has won numerous prizes selected by children, such as the Smarties Book Prize. This collection of newly commissioned essays explores Wilson's literature from all angles. The essays cover not only the content and themes of Wilson's writing, but also her success as a publishing phenomenon and the branding of her books. Issues of gender roles and child/carer relationships are examined alongside Wilson's writing style and use of techniques such as the unreliable narrator. The book also features an interview with Jacqueline Wilson herself, where she discusses the challenges of writing social realism for young readers and how her writing has changed over her lengthy career.

Download or read book Author and Narrator written by Dorothee Birke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distinction between author and narrator is one of the cornerstones of narrative theory. In the past two decades, however, scope, implications and consequences of this distinction have become the subjects of debate. This volume offers contributions to these debates from different vantage points: literary studies, linguistics, philosophy, and media studies. It thus manifests the status of narrative theory as a transdisciplinary project.

Download or read book The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative Promoting Positive Change written by Corinna Assmann and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives - this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to actualize and further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning's eminent scholarship over the past decades. Engaging with her formative interdisciplinary work, the volume seeks to explore potentials of change through the transformative power of literature and narrative - to be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today's world. The book is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.

Download or read book Fiction in the Age of Risk written by Tony Hughes-d'Aeth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Ulrich Beck theorised a ‘Risk Society’ (Risikogesellschaft) in 1986, the threat of global annihilation through nuclear war remained uppermost in the minds of his readership. Three decades on, questions about whether the sensation of risk has mutated or evolved in the intervening period, and whether fiction exhibits evidence of such a change, remain just as urgent. While the immediate risk of the Cold War’s ‘mutually assured destruction’ through World War Three seems to have ebbed, the paradox is that the social goal of safety and security seem to elude attainment. Global financial collapse, Islamic terrorism, human-authored climate change, epidemic disease outbreaks, refugee crises and the chronic erosion of the welfare state now preoccupy those in the developed world and provide the horizons for contemporary anxieties worldwide. The contributions to this volume explore these themes, locating their significance and representation in a diverse range of contemporary literature, film, and comics, from China, Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom, Pakistan, and the United States. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Download or read book Magic Words Magic Worlds written by Matthew Oliver and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While all fiction uses words to construct models of the world for readers, nowhere is this more obvious than in fantasy fiction. Epic fantasy novels create elaborate secondary worlds entirely out of language, yet the writing style used to construct those worlds has rarely been studied in depth. This book builds the foundations for a study of style in epic fantasy. Close readings of selected novels by such writers as Steven Erikson, Ursula Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin and Brandon Sanderson offer insights into the significant implications of fantasy's use of syntax, perspective, paratexts, frame narratives and more. Re-examining critical assumptions about the reading experience of epic fantasy, this work explores the genre's reputation for flowery, archaic language and its ability to create a sense of wonder. Ultimately, it argues that epic fantasy shapes the way people think, examining how literary representation and style influence perception.

Download or read book Fictions of Dementia written by Susanne Katharina Christ and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.

Download or read book Ethos and Narrative Interpretation written by Liesbeth Korthals Altes and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation examines the fruitfulness of the concept of ethos for the theory and analysis of literary narrative. The notion of ethos refers to the broadly persuasive effects of the image one may have of a speaker’s psychology, world view, and emotional or ethical stance. 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? In the answer Liesbeth Korthals Altes proposes to such questions, ethos attributions are deeply implicated in the process of interpreting and evaluating narrative texts. Demonstrating the extent to which ethos attributions, and hence, interpretive acts, play a tacit role in many methods of narratological analysis, Korthals Altes also questions the agenda and epistemological status of various narratologies, both classical and post-classical. Her approach, rooted in a broad understanding of the role and circulation of narrative art in culture, rehabilitates interpretation, both as a tool and as an object of investigation in narrative studies.

Download or read book Narrative in Culture written by Astrid Erll and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Relevance and Narrative Research written by Matei Chihaia and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Relevance” is one of the most widely used buzz words in academic and other socio-political discourses and institutions today, which constantly ask us to “be relevant.” To date, there is no profound scholarly conceptualization of the term, however, which is widely accepted in the humanities. Relevance and Narrative Research closes this gap by initiating a discussion which turns the vaguely defined evaluative tool “relevance” into an object of study. The contributors to this volume do so by firmly situating questions of relevance in the context of narrative theory. Briefly put, they ask either “What can ‘relevance’ do for narrative research?” or “What can narrative research do for better understanding ‘relevance?’” or both. The basic assumption is that relevance is a relational term. Further assuming that most (if not all) relations which human beings encounter within their cultures are narratively constructed, the contributors to this volume suggest that reflections on narrative and narrative research are fundamental to any endeavor to conceptualize notions of “relevance.”