Jan Alber

A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today’s world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others. Unnatural Narrative looks at 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. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers’ minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement.

Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama

Unnatural Narrative

Climate change and the apocalypse are frequently associated in the popular imagination of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together climatologists, theologians, historians, literary scholars, and philosophers to address and critically assess this association. The contributing authors are concerned, among other things, with the relation between cultural and scientific discourses on climate change; the role of apocalyptic images and narratives in representing environmental issues; and the tension between reality and fiction in apocalyptic representations of catastrophes. By focusing on how figures in fictional texts interact with their environment and deal with the consequences of climate change, this volume foregrounds the broader social and cultural function of apocalyptic narratives of climate change. By evoking a sense of collective human destiny in the face of the ultimate catastrophe, apocalyptic narratives have both cautionary and inspirational functions. Determining the extent to which such narratives square with scientific knowledge of climate change is one of the main aims of this book.

The Apocalyptic Dimensions of Climate Change

Brian Richardson

Henrik Skov Nielsen

A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative offers a collection of foundational essays introducing the reader to the full scope of unnatural narrative theory: its meaning, its goals, its extent, its paradoxes. This volume brings together a distinguished group of international critics, scholars, and historians that includes several of the world's leading narrative theorists. Together, they survey many basic areas of narrative studies from an unnatural perspective: story, time, space, voice, minds, narrative levels, "realism," nonfiction, hyperfiction, and narrative poetry. Rarely have these fundamental concepts been subjected to such an original and thoroughgoing reconceptualization. Much of the book is directed toward an investigation of experimental and antirealist work. Each essay focuses on texts and episodes that narrative theory has tended to neglect, and each provides theoretical formulations that are commensurate with such exceptional, albeit neglected, works. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative articulates and delineates the newest and most radical movement in narrative studies. This anthology will be of great interest to students and scholars of narrative studies and of the history and theory of modern fiction.

A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative

Monika Fludernik

In this volume, an international group of contributors presents new perspectives on narrative. Using David Herman’s 1999 definition of "postclassical narratology" from Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (OSUP) as their launching point, these eleven essayists explore the various ways in which new approaches overlap and interrelate to form new ways of understanding narrative texts. Postclassical narratology has reached a new phase of consolidation but also continued diversification. This collection therefore discriminates between what one could call a critical but frame-abiding and a more radical frame-transcending or frame-shattering handling of the structuralist paradigm. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses discusses a large variety of different aspects of narrative, such as extensions of classical narratology, new generic applications (autobiography, oral narratives, poetry, painting, and film), the history of narratology, the issue of fictionality, the role of cognition, and questions of authorship and authority, as well as thematic matters related to ethics, gender, and queering. Additionally, it uses a wide spectrum of critical approaches, including feminism, psychoanalysis, media studies, the rhetorical theory of narrative, unnatural narratology, and cognitive studies. In this manner the essays manage to produce new insights into many key issues in narratology. The contributors also demonstrate that narratologists nowadays see the object of their research as more variegated than was the case twenty years ago: they resort to a number of different methods in combination when approaching a problem, and they tend to ground their analyses in a rich contextual framework.

Approaches and Analyses

Postclassical Narratology

Per Krogh Hansen

This collection of essays looks at two important manifestations of postclassical narratology, namely transmedial narratology on the one hand, and unnatural narratology on the other. The articles deal with films, graphic novels, computer games, web series, the performing arts, journalism, reality games, music, musicals, and the representation of impossibilities. The essays demonstrate how new media and genres as well as unnatural narratives challenge classical forms of narration in ways that call for the development of analytical tools and modelling systems that move beyond classical structuralist narratology. The articles thus contribute to the further development of both transmedial and unnatural narrative theory, two of the most important manifestations of postclassical narratology.

Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges

Beyond Classical Narration

Louise Brix Jacobsen

Stefan Iversen

Rikke Andersen Kraglund

Camilla Mohring Reestorff

This book presents new ways of thinking about the historical, epistemological and institutional role of literature, and aims at providing a theoretically well-founded basis for what might otherwise be considered a relatively unfounded historical fact, i.e. that both literature and the teaching of literature hold a privileged position in many educational institutions. The contributors take their point of departure in the title of the volume and use narratological, historical, cognitive, rhetorical, postcolonial and political frameworks to pursue two separate but not necessarily related questions: Why literature? and, Why study? This collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses on literature as a medium among, and compared to, other media and includes essays on the physical and mental geography of literature, focusing on the consequences and values of its reading and studying.

Why Study Literature?

Rüdiger Heinze

In recent years, the study of unnatural narratives has become an exciting new but still disparate research program in narrative theory. For the first time, this collection of essays presents and discusses the new analytical tools that have so far been developed on the basis of unnatural novels, short stories, and plays and extends these findings through analyses of testimonies, comics, graphic novels, films, and oral narratives. Many narratives do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it but confront us with strange narrative worlds which rely on principles that have very little to do with the actual world around us. The essays in this collection develop new narratological tools and modeling systems which are designed to capture the strangeness and extravagance of such anti-realist narratives. Taken together, the essays offer a systematic investigation of anti-mimetic techniques and strategies that relate to different narrative parameters, different media, and different periods within literary history.

Unnatural Narratives - Unnatural Narratology

A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today's world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others. Unnatural Narrative looks at 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. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers' minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement.

Greta Olson

This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.

Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives

How to Do Things with Narrative

Alice Bell

This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century. Current cultural theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels, autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such texts rely. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Jan Alber

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