Narratology

About: Narratology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2833 publications have been published within this topic receiving 50998 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theory.

Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

Abstract: Mike Cadden - Introduction 1. Narrative and Genre 1. Telling Old Tales Newly: Intertextuality in Young Adult Fiction for Girls / Elisabeth Rose Gruner 2. Familiarity Breeds a Following: Transcending the Formulaic in the Snicket Series / Danielle Russell 3. The Power of Secrets: Backwards Construction in Detective Fiction for Children / Chris McGee II. Narrative and The Picture Book 4. Focalization in Children's Picture Books: Who sees in words and pictures / Angela Yannicopoulou 5. No Consonance, No Consolation: John Burningham's Time to Get Out of the Bath, Shirley / Magdalena Sikorska 6. Telling the Story/Breaking the Boundaries: Metafiction and the Enhancement of Children's Literary Development in The Bravest Ever Bear and The Story of the Falling Star / Alexandra Lewis 7. Perceiving The Red Tree: Writerly Metaphor & Sensible Anarchy / Andrea Schwenke Wylie 8. Now Playing: Silent Cinema and Picture Book Montage / Nathalie op de Beeck III. Narrators and Implied Readers 9. Melodrama with a Modern Point of View: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird / Holly Blackford 10. The Identification Fallacy: Perspective and Subjectivity in Children's Literature / Maria Nikolajeva 11. The Development of Hebrew Children's Literature: From Men Pulling Children Along to Women Meeting Them Where They Are / Dana Keren-Yaar IV. Narrative Time 12. Shifting Worlds: Constructing the Subject, Narrative, and History in Historical Time Shifts / Susan Stewart 13. "Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know": Narrative Theory and Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood / Martha Hixon 14. "Time No Longer": The Context(s) of Time in Tom's Midnight Garden / Angelika Zirker Contributors Bibliography Further Reading Index

Towards a Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory: Literary Narratives, Traveling Tropes, and the Case of Virginia Woolf and the Tagores

Abstract: The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a[n alien] language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. . . . I use the word “alien,” yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional make-up. . . . After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly. . . . There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous “ats” and “ons” to bother us—we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move

Contemporary Narrative : Textual production, multimodality and multiliteracies

Abstract: Contemporary Narrative introduces key issues and trends in contemporary narrative studies. Taking a case study approach, it traces key narrative developments in the context of a range of theoretical approaches, including multimodality, multilingualism and transliteracy. It offers students of contemporary narrative an overview of the way in which twenty-first century narratives are constructed and the extent to which their construction depends on a range of social, cultural, linguistic and technological factors as well as on individual creativity and expressivity. The book brings together insights from narratology, semiotics, linguistics and translation studies and applies them to the issues raised by contemporary literary and cultural texts, particularly in relation to processes of adaptation, translation and transformation across modes and media. Highlighting the key features of contemporary narrative from a critical and analytic perspective, it also explores the close relationships between reading and writing and the critical and creative dimensions of text to reveal the creativity at work in a range of innovative contemporary narratives.

Wise Economies: Storytelling, Narrative Authority, and Brevity in the American Short Story, 1819-1980.

Abstract: This study proposes a new way of measuring brevity in the American short story. Since Edgar Allan Poe's 1847 definition of the tale, literary criticism has looked to various structural features within the text to define the elements that distinguish the short story from other prose genres like the novel. I argue that brevity is an essential feature of storytelling and suggest that its perception is molded and shaped by several historical factors. The phrase "wise economy" offers two ways of thinking about the conciseness of the form: it evokes a history of rhetorical economy central to the formation of a distinctly American English and, more broadly, the exchange that takes place between a storyteller and his/her audience in the narrative act. These meanings work at crosspurposes: rhetorical economy results in the disappearance of the storyteller whose presence is the most visible marker of exchange. I trace how the general elision of the narrative act shapes the reader's perception of the meaning in a text in four different modes of storytelling (romanticism, realism, modernism, and minimalism) by proposing an interpretive model grounded in speech-act theoiy. This model is in turn applied to works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Ome Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Richard Wright, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver.