Narratologia

At the surface, fantastic storyworlds appear free of the constraints of reality – yet for all their limitless potential, most popular fantasy texts still cling to patriarchal representations of gender. Drawing on the cognitive framework of Cultural Models Theory (CMT), this book examines the reasons behind this phenomenon by analyzing the intersection between gender and magic in four contemporary fantasy series: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy, and Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy. Magic as a core manifestation of the impossible that sets fantasy apart from other genres serves as the focal point for an exploration of the strategies by which fantasy engages with gender issues on its own terms. Showcasing the potential of CMT as a tool for literary analysis and, more specifically, as a framework through which to understand both gender and genre, this book provides new insights into how readers make sense of fantastic storyworlds and the anchoring role that gender models play in that process. Overall, this analysis demonstrates how CMT can improve our understanding of the interplay of author, reader, text, and cultural context and the significant role of human cognition therein.

Metanarration – reflecting on storytelling within a narrative text – is a widespread transmedial phenomenon that has received little scholarly attention so far. This book provides a fresh theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding the term, along with a rigorous presentation of its scope and reach across different media, illustrated with a range of examples from narrative texts, drama, film, and comics.

In the wake of the cognitive turn in the humanities, narrative research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. The theory of storyworld possible selves brings approaches from a range of disciplines such as cognitive narrative theory, cognitive linguistics, and social psychology, to bear on the study of narrative engagement. The diversity of the contributions to this volume testifies to the interdisciplinarity of the storyworld possible selves approach: while some of its chapters explore applications of storyworld possible selves theory to the study of real readers’ interaction with both fictional and non-fictional narratives,  others address issues connected to the textual construction of authors, narrators, and characters as narrative perspectivizers.

Ornamental Narration is a narration in which thematic and formal equivalences dominate. Equivalence comprises two types of relations: similarity and opposition. They have in common that the elements linked by them are identical in at least one characteristic and non-identical in another characteristic. Equivalence produces, against the sequentiality of the story, a simultaneity of elements which are often distant from one another not only on the syntagmatic axis of the text, but also on the time axis of the story. Equivalence competes with temporal links such as sequentiality and causality. This untemporal relationship brings the temporal change and its logic to light.

The study examines works by Puškin, Rilke, Čexov, Beer-Hofmann, Belyj, Babel’, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikitin, Pil’njak, Schnitzler, Zamjatin, Barskova.

The dynamic nature of storytelling has long been one of the major concerns of narrative research, but relatively little scholarship has engaged with the relationship between storytelling dynamics and the underlying material forms of cultural texts. This volume seeks to remedy this by asking questions such as: How might the affordances of new media guide audience reception in subtle ways? How might the dynamism of legacy media be better recognized when examined through a multimedial lens? How do the physical processes of production define the horizons of both authorial activity and audience response?

The insight that drives these investigations is two-fold: first, that functions and effects of narratives are deeply intertwined with material forces of production, distribution, and reception; and second, that an analysis of any specific narrative must include attention to these material matters and how they affect the unfolding of stories over time.

The chapters in this collection explore interplays between material forces and narrative dynamics across a range of genres and intellectual arenas. In doing so, they both fill gaps in current methodological frameworks and call attention to the many gaps that are yet to be filled.

Why do we conceptualize our experience primarily in terms of stories? This monograph is a groundbreaking exploration of how narrative structures mirror the architecture of human thought.

Drawing from disciplines as diverse as narratology, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, it meticulously examines Joseph Campbell’s theory of the ‘monomyth’, positing its isomorphism with the Categories of Judgment that Immanuel Kant considered innate to human cognition. The book presents a compelling case that stories represent a reflection of cognitive processes, arguing that humans inherently interpret the world and their experiences through a narrative schema deeply ingrained in our consciousness. Rooted in cognitive semiotics, it analyzes in detail the structural similarities between narrative and cognition.

Offering a novel understanding of the fundamental narrative nature of human thought and its implications for how we perceive and interact with the world, this book is essential for scholars in narratology and semiotics, writers, and anyone fascinated by storytelling.

As a well-known phenomenon in everyday communication, ambiguity has increasingly become the subject of interdisciplinary research in recent years. However, within this context, it has been observed that words or expressions situated within the artistic framework of storytelling have not yet been at the centre of research interest. This book aims to bridge this gap by examining the phenomenon of ambiguity from the perspective of narratology – understood as a general theory of narration and narrative communication.

The volume pursues two goals: Firstly, it seeks to demonstrate that the interdisciplinary combination of linguistics, cultural history and narratology enriches the field of literary studies significantly. This focus not only highlights how narrative techniques often rely on everyday language conventions, but also explores how various textual features, narrative devices, or even entire storylines can be affected by phenomena (or lead to experiences) of ambiguity. These ambiguities often serve as poetic strategies that are deliberately set in the communicative process of text and reader to achieve certain narrative goals. Secondly, ambiguity – as a characteristic of (narrative) communication – seves as a linking element across different fictional (and factual) text types and genres throughout time and cultures.

The collected essays cover a wide range of narrative texts, from Roman comedy to funerary reliefs, from historiographical writings to utopian tales, from Goethe’s novels to contemporary fantasy literature. In its broad approach, the volume thus contributes to the project of diachronic narratology, which, like the research on ambiguity in literary and cultural studies, has recently gained increasing momentum.

The combined consideration of ambiguity and narratology not only raises awareness of phenomena of ambiguity in narrative texts but also encourage reflection on the theoretical foundations of narrative, particularly on the methods and devices used to describe these ambiguous structures. Overall, the volume represents an exploration of a relatively unexplored interdisciplinary field, aiming to stimulate further research.

There is a growing interest in studying narrative discourse as ‘experimental values laboratory,’ both reflecting social values and participating in their circulation. Given the omnipresence of narrative and story-telling practices in public life, from advertising to politics, law, and the media, the need for narrative savviness – that is, the ability to read for the values that inhere in and are transmitted through narrative – transcends the study of fiction.

This volume brings into focus the ways in which narratives are informed and shaped by values, and how they transmit values themselves. The authors in the volume take a broad range of approaches to narrative, including narratology, rhetoric, ecocriticism, narrative (meta)hermeneutics, applied narratology, and frame theory. By bringing together strands of contemporary narrative theory that are not often found in dialogue with one another, the volume aims to capture the most recent developments in the study of narrative ethics.

It has become a truism that we all think in the narrative mode, both in everyday life and in science. But what does this mean precisely? Scholars tend to use the term ‘narrative’ in a broad sense, implying not only event-sequencing but also the representation of emotions, basic perceptual processes or complex analyses of data sets. The volume addresses this blind spot by using clear selection criteria: only non-fictional texts by experts are analysed through the lens of both classical and postclassical narratology – from Aristotle to quantum physics and from nineteenth-century psychiatry to early childhood psychology; they fall under various genres such as philosophical treatises, case histories, textbooks, medical reports, video clips, and public lectures. The articles of this volume examine the central but continuously shifting role that event-sequencing plays within scholarly and scientific communication at various points in history – and the diverse functions it serves such as eye witnessing, making an argument, inferencing or reasoning. Thus, they provide a new methodological framework for both literary scholars and historians of science and medicine.

What is narration? This book sheds light on two figurative responses that, in narratology, can be qualified as metalepses (the overlapping of narrative layers): narration as present observing and narration as the immediate production of action. This book pursues both ideas from antiquity to the present, with some far-reaching differences coming to light behind the formal constants.

"History is told" is largely the consensus in discussions of history theory about the representation of history. There is, however, a discernible disagreement about how history is told. This volume transfers selected national historiographical narratives into a narrative-theoretical systematics and makes these texts visible in their aesthetic-literary representation, narrative attitude and convention as a construct.

Telling a story requires selecting and assembling individual elements of the events one wishes to communicate. The "nonnarrated" are the events (or parts of events) that were deliberately left out of the selection, meaning all that was not chosen to be told in the story, or chosen not to be told. Since the realm of the nonnarrated in any given story is infinitely large, studying the nonnarrated requires focusing on that which is not told but nevertheless belongs to a story. This monograph explores the phenomenon of the nonnarrated in narrative short forms from Cechov to Murakami and in novels by Dostoevskij and Robbe-Grillet.

This handbook brings together 42 contributions by leading narratologists devoted to the study of narrative devices in European literatures from antiquity to the present. Each entry examines the use of a specific narrative device in one or two national literatures across the ages, whether in successive or distant periods of time. Through the analysis of representative texts in a range of European languages, the authors compellingly trace the continuities and evolution of storytelling devices, as well as their culture-specific manifestations. In response to Monika Fludernik’s 2003 call for a "diachronization of narratology," this new handbook complements existing synchronic approaches that tend to be ahistorical in their outlook, and departs from postclassical narratologies that often prioritize thematic and ideological concerns. A new direction in narrative theory, diachronic narratology explores previously overlooked questions, from the evolution of free indirect speech from the Middle Ages to the present, to how changes in narrative sequence encoded the shift from a sacred to a secular worldview in early modern Romance literatures. An invaluable new resource for literary theorists, historians, comparatists, discourse analysts, and linguists.

This book proposes the concept of "fictional contamination" to capture the fact that fictionalization and literary complexity can be found across different kinds of narrative. Exploring conversational storytelling in oral history and other interviews from socionarratological perspectives, the book systematically discusses key narrative features such as story templates, dialogue, double deixis, focalization or perspective-taking and mind representation as well as special narrative forms including second-person narration and narratives of vicarious experience. These features and forms attest to storytellers’ linguistic creativity and serve the function of involving listeners by making stories more interesting. Shared by fictional and conversational narratives at a basic level, they can bring conversational stories closer to fiction and potentially compromise their credibility if used extensively. Detailed analyses of broad-ranging examples are undertaken against a rich narrative-theoretical background drawn from the fields of narratology, linguistics, oral history, life storytelling, psychology and philosophy. The book is of interest to scholars and students working in these fields and anyone fascinated by the richness of conversational storytelling.

Pen-and-paper role-playing games provide many opportunities for storytelling. This well-informed study takes an application-based approach to develop a narratology of pen-and-paper role-play that sheds light on both the communicative and ludic qualities of the object of study. Its narrative design creates potentials for literature pedagogy, which this volume discusses in connection with narratological modeling.

This study examines the German tradition of the "Seven Wise Masters" in the form of a digital examination that combines hermeneutical readings, narratological formalization, and statistical textual observations. In this way, it focuses on the principle of serial narration, which has had a considerable impact on narrative traditions, as well as the unique features of individual versions and editions.

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.

Figurally colored narration (FCN) is narrator’s discourse (whether in the first or third person) that adopts salient features of character’s text, mainly valuation and designation, without signaling the figural part in any way. Unlike free indirect discourse, FCN does not refer to current acts of consciousness, but to typical, characteristic segments of the character’s text. There are two main modes of FCN: contagion of the narrator’s discourse with a character’s text, and the more or less ironical reproduction of a character’s text in narrative discourse. In the latter case, the narrator’s criticism may refer to either the content of the character’s text or to its form of expression.

This study begins with a definition and an example of FCN as a narrative device, followed by an analysis of terms used for FCN in German, Anglophone and Russian literary criticism. Building on the perception of FCN as a phenomenon of interference between narrator’s and character’s text (text interference), this book analyses the function and applications of FCN in narratives written in German, English and Russian.

This study unites narratology and comic theory to describe evocative narrative strategies. It demonstrates how the narrative strategies used in Arthurian literature pick up on particular forms of knowledge specific to that period of cultural history in the act of literary communication. Alongside narrative strategies that generate comedy, the study thus traces possibilities for reconstructing historically absent inference knowledge.

While narratives of disease have long been an important object of analysis in disciplines that work with narrative theory, the connection between health and narration has so far received little attention. This volume examines this connection from an interdisciplinary perspective, investigating the aesthetics of health narratives, performances of that narratively generate health, and the ideologies of a diverse range of "healing" narratives.

2023 Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative

ESSE Book Award for Junior Scholars for a book in the field of Literatures in the English Language

Responding to the current surge in present-tense novels, Making Time is an innovative contribution to narratological research on present-tense usage in narrative fiction. Breaking with the tradition of conceptualizing the present tense purely as a deictic category denoting synchronicity between a narrative event and its presentation, the study redefines present-tense narration as a fully-fledged narrative strategy whose functional potential far exceeds temporal relations between story and discourse. The first part of the volume presents numerous analytical categories that systematically describe the formal, structural, functional, and syntactic dimensions of present-tense usage in narrative fiction. These categories are then deployed to investigate the uses and functions of present-tense narration in selected twenty-first century novels, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, and Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys. The seven case studies serve to illustrate the ubiquity of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction, ranging from the historical novel to the thriller, and to investigate the various ways in which the present tense contributes to narrative worldmaking.

Much of the attention paid to the poetry of the GDR was closely tied to one genre and narrative mode – the lyrical narration of the ballad. With a genre history spanning the period 1945 to 1989, this volume presents this distinctive feature of GDR literature using narratological analyses, tracing it to the poetology and aesthetics of the GDR.

This volume is the first to systematically analyze ancient narrative theory in German. The guiding principle is the theory that, although ancient authors like Aristotle were the forerunners of the modern categories of narrative theories, many concepts have been reinterpreted in the course of their reception. It is against this backdrop that this monograph identifies the specific features of ancient narrative theory.

We live in an age that is witnessing a growing interest in narrative studies, cognitive neuroscientific tools, mind studies and artificial intelligence hypotheses. This book therefore aims to expand the exegesis of Carroll's "Alice" books, aligning them with the current intellectual environment. The theoretical force of this volume lies in the successful encounter between a great book (and all its polysemous ramifications) and a new interpretative point of view, powerful enough to provide a new original contribution, but well grounded enough not to distort the text itself. Moreover, this book is one of the first to offer a complete, thorough analysis of one single text through the theoretical lens of cognitive narratology, and not just as a series of brief examples embedded within a more general discussion. It emphasises in a more direct, effective way the actual novelty and usefulness of the dialogue established between narrative theory and the cognitive sciences. It links specific concepts elaborated in the theory of cognitive narratology with the analysis of the "Alice" books, helping in this way to discuss, question and extend the concepts themselves, opening up new interpretations and practical methods.

The question of how to preserve a “living” (and not merely academic) memory of the Nazi era beyond the lifetime of living witnesses is primarily a question of narrative transmission. In the context of experientiality research in literary studies and using the example of transgenerational story-telling techniques, the study shows how historical experiences can be evoked by reading and embedded into the reader’s personal body of experience.

This volume offers ready access to Elisabeth Gülich’s individual publications and provides an overview of a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on oral narrative, including storytelling in conversation and in doctor-patient discourse, verbalization of the “unsayable,” repetitive telling of the same story, and the description of linguistic techniques for the treatment of anxiety and seizure disorder.

The study proposes a descriptive vocabulary to encompass the diverse range of variants of polyphony in narrative texts. Along with the genetical system, it establishes categories that enable a differentiated classification of various forms of assertions. The analyses are undertaken from a comparative viewpoint in order to emphasize the translatability of the categories to other national philologies.

The book first traces historical concepts of motivation. Next, based on narrative works from different cultures and epochs, it demonstrates specific forms of causal and aesthetic motivation. The analysis of works begins with Boccaccio and Cervantes and leads across different cultural forms of romantic, realist, and modernist styles, including postmodern motivation in the works of the Russian author Andrei Bitov.

The study undertakes a systematic narratological analysis of ambivalence in 15^th and 16^th century romances. Rather than focusing on their cultural and historical context, it explores the literary potential and diverse functions of ambivalent narrative, thus providing a different perspective on the narrative strategies of pre-modern texts and their theoretical and methodological understanding.

Unreliable narration is an often-used but controversial narratological category. This volume examines in detail the existing theoretical views and investigates the range of uses of various concepts and types of unreliability. Finally, on this basis and considering the relevant criteria, it proposes an explication of unreliable narration.

Anyone who tells stories describes the worlds where they take place. Narrated worlds are a constitutive part the narrative. Despite their major significance, such worlds are given short shrift in narratology. This volume acknowledges the broad range of processes whereby narratives stage diverse worlds: from premodern to postmodern, realism to fantasy, in literature and film.

How does theater narrate? Theater narratology thinks narrativity and performativity together. On the basis of narratology and theater studies it develops for the first time an heuristic, analytic model of performative narration that can be practically employed for narratological performance analysis, where the narrative dimension has been hitherto underrepresented.

Narratology has hitherto primarily considered unreliable narratives with homodiegetic narrators. This work widens the scope of narrative unreliability to encompass the various forms of unreliable narration as well as unreliable focalisation. In addition to providing a typology, this work develops descriptive and explanatory models which are illustrated on the basis of an analysis of English fiction.

This study sketches an historical narratology that integrates into its approach narrative factors, the structure of the narrated world, and semantic elements. With the help of this method, the study reconstructs the diverse, simultaneously present, and sometimes contradictory conceptions of time in literary fiction from the early modern period. It demonstrates that there is not one temporality, but rather a diversity of narrated temporalities.

Otto Ludwig’s Romanstudien is among the most important works of 20^th century German narratology history. Matthias Grüne explores the systematic and historical impact of Ludwig’s reflections on narrative forms. The study clearly discloses the epistemological roots of the text and the reasons it should be valued as a key document of literary realism.

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.

Perturbatory narration is a heuristic concept, applicable both quantitatively and qualitatively to a specific type of complex narratives for which narratology has not yet found an appropriate classification. This new term refers to complex narrative strategies that produce intentionally disturbing effects such as surprise, confusion, doubt or disappointment ‒ effects that interrupt or suspend immersion in the aesthetic reception process. The initial task, however, is to indicate what narrative conventions are, in fact, questioned, transgressed, or given new life by perturbatory narration. The key to our modeling lies in its combination of individual procedures of narrative strategies hitherto regarded as unrelated. Their interplay has not yet attracted scholarly attention. The essays in this volume present a wide range of contemporary films from Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France and Germany. The perturbatory narration concept enables to typify and systematize moments of disruption in fictional texts, combining narrative processes of deception, paradox and/or empuzzlement and to analyse these perturbing narrative strategies in very different filmic texts.

Mental events in the minds of narrated individuals are an essential feature of narrated works. This study develops a typology of techniques for depicting the consciousness of narrated figures, and also seeks to delineate criteria and conditions for mental events. It then investigates how changes in consciousness are depicted in traditional narrative works from various cultures and epochs.

Narratology has been flourishing in recent years thanks to investigations into a broad spectrum of narratives, at the same time diversifying its theoretical and disciplinary scope as it has sought to specify the status of narrative within both society and scientific research. The diverse endeavors engendered by this situation have brought narrative to the forefront of the social and human sciences and have generated new synergies in the research environment.
Emerging Vectors of Narratology brings together 27 state-of-the-art contributions by an international panel of authors that provide insight into the wealth of new developments in the field. The book consists of two sections. "Contexts" includes articles that reframe and refine such topics as the implied author, narrative causation and transmedial forms of narrative; it also investigates various historical and cultural aspects of narrative from the narratological perspective. "Openings" expands on these and other questions by addressing the narrative turn, cognitive issues, narrative complexity and metatheoretical matters.
The book is intended for narratologists as well as for readers in the social and human sciences for whom narrative has become a crucial matrix of inquiry.

Understanding Metalepsis provides a state-of-the-art overview of the narratological concept of metalepsis and develops new ways of investigating the forms and functions of metaleptic narratives. Informed by a hermeneutic perspective, this study offers not only an account of the complexities that characterize the process of understanding metaleptic phenomena, but also metatheoretical insights into the hermeneutics of narratology.

Lyric poetry as a temporal art-form makes pervasive use of narrative elements in organizing the progressive course of the poetic text. This observation justifies the application of the advanced methodology of narratology to the systematic analysis of lyric poems. After a concise presentation of this transgeneric approach to poetry, the study sets out to demonstrate its practical fruitfulness in detailed analyses of a large number of English (and some American) poems from the early modern period to the present. The narratological approach proves particularly suited to focus on the hitherto widely neglected dimension of sequentiality, the dynamic progression of the poetic utterance and its eventful turns, which largely constitute the raison d'être of the poem. To facilitate comparisons, the examples chosen share one special thematic complex, the traumatic experience of severe loss: the death of a beloved person, the imminence of one’s own death, the death of a revered fellow-poet and the loss of a fundamental stabilizing order. The function of the poems can be described as facing the traumatic experience in the poetic medium and employing various coping strategies. The poems thus possess a therapeutic impetus.

Literary studies still lack an extensive comparative analysis of different kinds of literature, including ancient and non-Western. How Literary Worlds Are Shaped. A Comparative Poetics of Literary Imagination aims to provide such a study. Literature, it claims, is based on individual and shared human imagination, which creates literary worlds that blend the real and the fantastic, mimesis and genre, often modulated by different kinds of unreliability. The main building blocks of literary worlds are their oral, visual and written modes and three themes: challenge, perception and relation. They are blended and inflected in different ways by combinations of narratives and figures, indirection, thwarted aspirations, meta-usages, hypothetical action as well as hierarchies and blends of genres and text types. Moreover, literary worlds are not only constructed by humans but also shape their lives and reinforce their sense of wonder. Finally, ten reasons are given in order to show how this comparative view can be of use in literary studies. In sum, How Literary Worlds Are Shaped is the first study to present a wide-ranging and detailed comparative account of the makings of literary worlds.

The depiction of another person’s consciousness is often regarded as the key characteristic of fictional narrative. Is it true, though, that factual narrative avoids presenting alien consciousness? This question is the focus of the present study. Using a computer-assisted diachronic narratological approach, the author analyzes a corpus of five coming-of-age novels and five biographies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Audionarratology is a new 'postclassical' narratology that explores interfaces of sound, voice, music and narrative in different media and across disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on sound studies and transmedial narratology, audionarratology combines concepts from both while also offering fresh insights. Sound studies investigate sound in its various manifestations from disciplinary angles as varied as anthropology, history, sociology, acoustics, articulatory phonetics, musicology or sound psychology. Still, a specifically narrative focus is often missing. Narratology has broadened its scope to look at narratives from transdisciplinary and transmedial perspectives. However, there is a bias towards visual or audio-visual media such as comics and graphic novels, film, TV, hyperfiction and pictorial art. The aim of this book is to foreground the oral and aural sides of storytelling, asking how sound, voice and music support narrative structure or even assume narrative functions in their own right. It brings together cutting-edge research on forms of sound narration hitherto neglected in narratology: radio plays, audiobooks, audio guides, mobile phone theatre, performance poetry, concept albums, digital stories, computer games, songs.

Whether in the Homeric epic, ancient romance, medieval epic poem, early modern prose romance, autobiography, postcolonial novel, the principal character’s place of origin has played a critical role in the narrative world.
This volume uses case examples to put the spotlight on the special connections between place and origin.

Distinguishing the graphic novel from other types of comic books has presented problems due to the fuzziness of category boundaries. Against the backdrop of prototype theory, the author establishes the graphic novel as a genre whose core feature is complexity, which again is defined by seven gradable subcategories: 1) multilayered plot and narration, 2) multireferential use of color, 3) complex text-image relation, 4) meaning-enhancing panel design and layout, 5) structural performativity, 6) references to texts/media, and 7) self-referential and metafictional devices. Regarding the subcategory of narration, the existence of a narrator as known from classical narratology can no longer be assumed. In addition, conventional focalization cannot account for two crucial parameters of the comics image: what is shown (point of view, including mise en scène) and what is seen (character perception). On the basis of François Jost’s concepts of ocularization and focalization, this book presents an analytical framework for graphic novels beyond conventional narratology and finally discusses aspects of subjectivity, a focal paradigm in the latest research. It is intended for advanced students of literature, scholars, and comics experts.

A major question in studies of aesthetic expression is how we can understand and explain similarities and differences among different forms of representation. In the current volume, this question is addressed through the lens of make-believe theory, a philosophical theory broadly introduced by two seminal works – Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe and Gregory Currie's The Nature of Fiction, both published 1990. Since then, make-believe theory has become central in the philosphical discussion of representation. As a first of its kind, the current volume comprises 17 detailed studies of highly different forms of representation, such as novels, plays, TV-series, role games, computer games, lamentation poetry and memoirs. The collection contributes to establishing make-believe theory as a powerful theoretical tool for a wide array of studies traditionally falling under the humanities umbrella.

Time and narrative are inseparably connected: there can be no narrative without time, and no time without narrative. Beyond this systemic relationship, which has been a favorite concern of narrative theory, the interplay of time and narrative evokes a broad range of aesthetic phenomena. This volume examines the multiplicity of time from methodological, medial, generic, and historical perspectives.

This study pertaining to the field of digital humanities takes a new approach to examine a familiar narratological phenomenon. It investigates how to identify the representation of speech, thought, and writing in narrative texts using digital methods. It thus takes a step toward narratological studies that include large quantities of text, enabling a new view of narrative.

Relationships between the what and the how in narratives about labor disputes are the focus of this study. It reveals interdependencies between narratological phenomena and conflict, using an application-oriented methodology that combines a strong empirical base with major theoretical insights, thereby expanding perspectives in narratology and beyond.

For decades, experts in Slavic studies and English and American studies have engaged in separate discussions on the narratological concepts of skaz and unreliable narration, generally unbeknownst to each other. This study challenges earlier attempts to define these terms and uses close textual analysis to integrate these stylistic and semantic phenomena for the first time into a new and synthetic typology of the narrator.

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.

Recent developments in cognitive narrative theory have called attention to readers' active participation in making sense of narrative. However, while most psychologically inspired models address interpreters' subpersonal (i.e., unconscious) responses, the experiential level of their engagement with narrative remains relatively undertheorized. Building on theories of experience and embodiment within today's "second-generation" cognitive science, and opening a dialogue with so-called "enactivist" philosophy, this book sets out to explore how narrative experiences arise from the interaction between textual cues and readers' past experiences. Caracciolo's study offers a phenomenologically inspired account of narrative, spanning a wide gamut of responses such as the embodied dynamic of imagining a fictional world, empathetic perspective-taking in relating to characters, and "higher-order" evaluations and interpretations. Only by placing a premium on how such modes of engagement are intertwined in experience, Caracciolo argues, can we do justice to narrative's psychological and existential impact on our lives. These insights are illustrated through close readings of literary texts ranging from Émile Zola's Germinal to José Saramago's Blindness.

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.

Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorie und Praxis ist von einer bislang kaum wahrgenommenen Asymmetrie gekennzeichnet: dem Kontrast zwischen den intensiven Bemühungen, Rezeptionsforschung und -theorie als Disziplin wissenschaftlich zu fundieren, und den unzulänglichen Versuchen, die aus diesen Positionen hervorgehenden Lesermodelle systematisch zu erfassen. Eine solche Systematisierung steht im Zentrum dieser wissenschaftstheoretischen Arbeit.

Ein ähnliches Ungleichgewicht besteht zwischen dem großen Aufwand, mit dem Editionsphilologien eine standardisierte Sicherung von Primärtexten als Vorbereitung der Textinterpretation betreiben, und der limitierten Aufmerksamkeit, die dabei historischen Rezeptionstexten eingeräumt wird. Während der erste Teil der Arbeit Lesermodelle systematisiert und hinsichtlich ihrer Funktionalisierbarkeit für eine historisierende Literaturwissenschaft prüft, formuliert der zweite Teil eine theoretische Begründung und einen methodischen Entwurf der historisierenden Rezeptionsanalyse. Sie sichtet und sichert Rezeptionszeugnisse realer Leser zur Stützung der interpretativ-hermeneutischen, sozialhistorischen und im weitesten Sinne empirischen Argumentation literaturwissenschaftlicher Historisierung.

Cinematic structures in literature have generally been examined from the perspective of intermediality theory, thereby neglecting some particular features of cinematic narrative. The author develops an analytic model based on narratology and sensitivity to context, offering insights into the typological spectrum of cinematic narrative and its history from the 19^th century until the present day.

There has been little previous research in ancient studies on the narratological notion of metalepses. The essays in this volume describe the forms, functions, and effects of metalepses in texts and artifacts. The authors demonstrate the diversity and ubiquity of metalepses as they occur in Akkadian and Egyptian literature, in the Hebrew Bible, in rabbinical Midrashim, in ancient pagan literature of all periods, and in early Christian literature.

This work uses textual hermeneutics to examine how we might conceive of myth as method. Following the central thesis that myth is uniquely suited for depicting cultural, historical, and social change, this book analyzes the topic through the examples of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Aristotelian poetics, and the late writings of Paul Ricœur. This interdisciplinary study makes a literary and philosophical contribution to elucidating the question of what we narrate when we are narrating myths.

This minutely detailed examination of a supposedly small grammatical detail, the use of the present tense, opens up new perspectives on a founding myth of the aesthetics of modernity: the longing for presence. This collection approaches the issue by documenting how the present tense became dominant in the 20th century novel. The authors draw on perspectives in fiction theory and narratology to delineate facets of this fundamental shift in literary aesthetics from the past tense to the present.

Storytelling is an essential element of human nature. This study identifies five universal "streams of narrative" - that is, five "hyper-genres" that serve as a system for classifying virtually all kinds of narration. In conjunction with concepts drawn from biology, psychology, and sociology, the study develops a solid anthropological foundation for these five streams of narrative. The author uses examples from diverse cultures, eras, and media to demonstrate the occurrence of overlapping and blending between the streams.

A central feature of the newer forms of authenticity is that they replace the truth of what is presented with the truthfulness of the presentation. While academic discussion of authenticity has focused mainly on the aesthetic aspects, this volume focuses on the narrative dimension of the phenomenon. The authors thereby reveal a conceptual shift from referential to relational authenticity. The essays examine issues related to production, narration, and reception, and thus provide the first contribution from narrative theory to research on authenticity.

How do we internalize literary characters and their fictional consciousness when we are reading? How does multi-perspectivity function? Drawing on modern cognitive research, this study addresses how the perspectives of different characters interact, and demonstrates that this interaction plays a critical role in our understanding and interpretation of literary texts. Using the English novel as an example, the author develops a general theory of perspectival interaction and demonstrates its explanatory power through detailed illustrative analyses.

The term ‘narrativity’ has gained considerable currency. But what does it actually mean? This is the question considered in the articles by linguists, media scholars, psychologists and other specialist academics that are compiled in this volume. They reveal the diversity of ways in which this term is used and describe various methods of delineation. The results indicate that narrativity is an umbrella term with a content that ranges from a philological (structure related) orientation to an anthropological (interpretation related) orientation.

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.

The present volume is targeted at an interdisciplinary audience, i.e. partly at literary scholars/narratologists interested in time theory outside their field, and partly at scholars outside literary studies who in turn would like to learn more about such concepts created in narrative theory. The anthology assembles both English-speaking and German contributions to a narrative theory of time constructs which have thus far not been translated into English, but have – directly or indirectly – inspired the theoretical discourse across disciplines.

The common methodological focus of the articles assembled here concerns the way in which the experience of chronological structure and ordering in (experienced or imagined) phenomena can be traced back to a logic of time “constructs”. Narrative time constructs – that is: models of chronological ordering which we generate while processing narratively encoded information – constitute a particularly rich body of examples. How we experience time is directly linked to how we narrate information, and how we re-construct principles of temporal ordering in the narrated content. The logic of narrative time constructs has therefore been of interest not only to narrative theory, but also to philosophy and cognitive science, and more recently to computational approaches toward modelling human time experience.

When readers become victims of the murder mysteries they are immersed in, when superheroes embark on a quest to challenge their authors or when the fictional rock band Gorillaz flirt with Madonna during their performance, then metalepsis in popular culture occurs. Metalepsis describes the transgression of the boundary between the fictional world and (a representation of) the real world. This volume establishes a transmedial definition of metalepsis and explores the phenomenon in twelve case studies across media and genres of popular culture: from film, TV series, animated cartoons, graphic novels and popular fiction to pop music, music videos, holographic projections and fan cultures.

Narrative studies have considered metalepsis so far largely as a phenomenon of postmodern or avant-garde literature. Metalepsis in Popular Culture investigates metalepsis’ ties to the popular and traces its transmedial importance through a wealth of examples from the turn of the 20th century to this day. The articles also address larger issues such as readerly immersion, the appeal of complexity in popular culture, or the negotiation of fiction and reality in media, and invite readers to rethink these issues through the prism of metalepsis.

Current Trends in Narratology offers an overview of cutting-edge approaches to theories of storytelling. The introduction details how new emphases on cognitive processing, non-prose and multimedia narratives, and interdisciplinary approaches to narratology have altered how narration, narrative, and narrativity are understood. The volume also introduces a third post-classical direction of research ‑ comparative narratology ‑ and describes how developments in Germany, Israel, and France may be compared with Anglophone research. Leading international scholars including Monika Fludernik, Richard Gerrig, Ansgar Nünning, John Pier, Brian Richardson, Alan Palmer, and Werner Wolf describe not only their newest research but also how this work dovetails with larger narratological developments.

Tales are told everywhere, not only in literature. Also other media, especially film, increasingly come into the focus of narrative theory. With his film narratology, Markus Kuhn provides the hitherto most comprehensive approach to the narrative analysis of the feature film and presents for the first time a systematic and theoretically coherent model of narratological film analysis. The practical and scholarly use lies both in the concise appraisal of the research situation as well as in the development of an application-oriented analysis model, which is illustrated by numerous examples of film.

This book investigates the narrated worlds of fantastic film and the methods of their narrative mediation. This includes instable and ambiguous perspectives of perception, abandonment and disintegration of spatial-temporal continuity, instances of destabilized narrators, blending of the narrative levels as well as categories of figure, space and the event of crossing borders of the genre in the staging of virtual media realities in the fantastic film. The book refers to examples of the early years of fictional film up to the present.

The ‘narrative turn’ in the humanities, which expanded the study of narrative to various disciplines, has found a correlate in the ‘medial turn’ in narratology. Long restricted to language-based literary fiction, narratology has found new life in the recognition that storytelling can take place in a variety of media, and often combines signs belonging to different semiotic categories: visual, auditory, linguistic and perhaps even tactile. The essays gathered in this volume apply the newly gained awareness of the expressive power of media to particular texts, demonstrating the productivity of a medium-aware analysis. Through the examination of a wide variety of different media, ranging from widely studied, such as literature and film, to new, neglected, or non-standard ones, such as graphic novels, photography, television, musicals, computer games and advertising, they address some of the most fundamental questions raised by the medial turn in narratology: how can narrative meaning be created in media other than language; how do different types of signs collaborate with each other in so-called ‘multi-modal works’, and what new forms of narrativity are made possible by the emergence of digital media.

In the interdisciplinary discourse between philosophy and historical, literary, and cultural studies this book explores the relationship between historical narratives and the experiences on which they are based and which give the first impetus for a genuine need to tell the story. Here a new concept of historical experience is formulated which elucidates the pre-narrative dimensions of historical creation of meaning and thus also enables a more adequate determination of the relationship of history and narration as well as individual and collective history.

The present study concerns itself with the development of a systematic set of instruments for describing concrete space in fictional narrative texts. It contains chapters on the linguistic generation of space, on its narrative mediation through the narration of events, of perceptions and through descriptions, on spatial structures and space-specific configurations of knowledge. In it, account is also taken of concepts from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, from pragmatics, social geography and evolutionary psychology. The concepts developed are tested on examples of text.

The eight contributions to this collection, written by members of the ‘Narratology  research group in Hamburg and by external experts, contain the basic categories of Russian and Czech narratology. These became significant for the development of international narratology or for the further development potential of the theory. The studied concepts include ‘fable’ and ‘subject’, ‘subject development’, ‘event’ and ‘fictional worlds’. The comparative studies explore and discuss Russian composition theory, the author theories of Slavic functionalism, formalistic film and theater concepts and narrative semantics in the conception of Prague structuralism. The spectrum of the discussed theorists includes the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the formalism-leaning theorist Michail Petrovsky, the Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský, Felix Vodička and Lubomír Doležel as well as Yuri Lotman, the central figure of the Moscow-Tartu school.

Narrative Research, once the domain of structuralist literary theory, has over the last 15 years developed into an international and interdisciplinary field. It is now commonly agreed that storytelling functions as a fundamental cognitive tool for sense-making and meaning production, and that human beings structure and communicate lived experience through oral, written and visual stories. Entitled Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, this volume collects fifteen essays which look at narrative and narrativity from various perspectives, including literary studies and hermeneutics, cognitive theory and creativity research, metaphor studies, film theory and intermediality, as well as memory studies, musicology, theology and psychology. The topics touch on a wide range of issues, such as the current state of narratology and its potential for development, narrativity in visual and auditive art forms, the cultural functions of narrative, and the role of narrative concepts across the disciplines. The volume introduces interested newcomers to the ongoing debate, reflecting the diversity of research questions and methodological approaches involved. It takes a critical, yet cautiously optimistic stance with regard to the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between narrative researchers, and invites experienced readers from any discipline interested in narrative to join this important debate, which promotes the exchange of ideas, concepts and methods between the humanities and the social sciences.

This handbook in English provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate 34 central terms. The articles present original research contributions and are all structured in a similar manner. Each contains a concise definition and a detailed explanation of the term in question. In a main section they present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research; they conclude with selected bibliographical references.

An event, defined as the decisive turn, the surprising point in the plot of a narrative, constitutes its tellability, the motivation for reading it. This book describes a framework for a narratological definition of eventfulness and its dependence on the historical, socio-cultural and literary context. A series of fifteen analyses of British novels and tales, from late medieval and early modern times to the late 20th century, demonstrates how this concept can be put into practice for a new, specifically contextual interpretation of the central relevance of these texts. The examples include Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”, Behn’s “Oroonoko”, Defoe’s “Moll Flanders”, Richardson’s “Pamela”, Fielding’s “Tom Jones”, Dickens’s “Great Expectations”, Hardy's “On the Western Circuit”, James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”, Joyce’s “Grace”, Conrad’s “Shadow-Line”, Woolf’s “Unwritten Novel”, Lawrence’s “Fanny and Annie”, Mansfield’s “At the Bay”, Fowles’s “Enigma” and Swift’s “Last Orders”. This selection is focused on the transitional period from 19th-century realism to 20th-century modernism because during these decades traditional concepts of what counts as an event were variously problematized; therefore, these texts provide a particularly interesting field for testing the analytical capacity of the term of eventfulness.

Stories do not actually exist in the (fictional or factual) world but are constituted, structured and endowed with meaning through the process of mediation, i.e. they are represented and transmitted through systems of verbal, visual or audio-visual signs. The terms usually proposed to describe aspects of mediation, especially perspective, point of view, and focalization, have yet to bring clarity to this field, which is of central importance, not only for narratology but also for literary and media studies. One crucial problem about mediation concerns the dimensions of its modeling effect, particularly the precise status and constellation of the mediating agents, i.e. author, narrator or presenter and characters. The question is how are the structure and the meaning of the story conditioned by these different positions in relation to the mediated happenings perceived from outside and/or inside the storyworld? In this volume, fourteen articles by international scholars from seven different countries address these problems anew from various angles, reviewing the sub-categorization of mediation and re-specifying its dimensions both in literary texts and other media such as drama and theater, film, and computer games.

This collected volume contains German translations with commentaries and annotations of 12 theoretical texts from the Russian pre-history of narratology. The texts, all of pre-formalistic, formalistic, or structuralist provenance or from sources close to formalism, are devoted to two key topics in Russian proto-narratology, the “sujet” and the work-immanent abstract author. The selection, translation, commentary and annotations were carried out by members of a sub-project within the Hamburg Narratology Research Group, which is funded by the German Research Foundation.

The present volume is concerned with the question of what distinguishes a prose text from the Age of Realism from one from the Modern Age. Starting from the present state of research in textual semantics and narratology, criteria are tested for characterising these two epochs, and new criteria are developed which allow this epochal change to be described more comprehensively within Russian prose writing. It is the intention to formalise the procedures deployed here to a large extent and, if possible, to quantify them using computers.

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.

Drawing on Greimas' narrative semiotics and on cognitive science, Richter develops his theory of the "narrative judgement" as the core of the "narrative negotiation of problems". Narratives present contingent decisions, but can conceal their contingency in the name of an ideology. As Richter amply demonstrates, the narrative judgement allows the negotiation in narrative of theoretical problems which seem incapable of resolution in argument, e.g. the problem of Job in the Old Testament and the theodicy problem from Leibniz to Kant.

Theorizing Narrativity is a collective work by an international array of leading specialists in narrative theory. It provides new perspectives on the nature of narrative, genre theory, narrative semiotics and communication theory. Most contributions center on the specificity of literary fiction, but each chapter investigates a different dimension of narrativity with many issues dealt with in innovative ways (including oral storytelling, the law, video games, causality, intertextuality and the theory of reading). There are chapters by Gerald Prince on narrativehood and narrativity, Meir Sternberg on the narrativity of the law-code, Werner Wolf on chance and Peter Hühn on eventfulness in fiction, Jukka Tyrkkö on kaleidoscope narratives, Marie-Laure Ryan on transfictionality and computer games, Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer as well as Monika Fludernik on the narrativity of drama, Beatriz Penas on (non)standard narrativities, David Rudrum on narrativity and performativity, Michael Toolan on textual guidance, John Pier on causality and retrospection, and José Ángel García Landa on retelling and represented narrations.

Lyric poetry is usually regarded as a genre in its own right, delineated from narrative and dramatic texts. This publication intends to use categories from narrative theory to develop the argument that poems also display basic characteristics seen as indicative of the narrative (in particular, the perspectivized presentation of sequentially ordered events). The results are firstly significant revisions of genre-theory, and secondly a considerable extension and precision in processes of textual analysis - including the use of scheme theory as used in cognitive psychology.

The volume sounds out the methodological potential of the central narratological category of 'voice' in its relation to 'person' and specifies this category principally against the background of Genette and Bachtin. In addition to papers with a theoretical orientation, there are also case studies, these always being linked with more general methodological concerns. The main focus is on borderline cases for unequivocally determining the position of the speaker or speech in texts. The papers examine, for example, the position and function of the text itself as a literary 'voice', and whether polyphony can be described as a variety of 'autonomous voices' without recourse to the concept of 'person'. The authors draw up new concepts of 'voice' in narrative theory, discuss the phenomenon of 'multiple voices' in literary texts and examine the category of 'voice' for its relevance as an instrument of textual analysis. The volume investigates all aspects of the relationship between the narrator's speech and that of the narrative figures within the triad of author, narrator and figure, drawing in historical aspects and insights from the psychology of cognition and reception. In this it presents innovative fundamental research on central questions of modern narrative theory.

This book addresses itself to the concept of the implied author, which has been the cause of controversy in cultural studies for some fifty years. The opening chapters examine the introduction of the concept in Wayne C. Booth’s “Rhetoric of Fiction” and the discussion of the concept in narratology and in the theory and practice of interpretation. The final chapter develops proposals for clarifying or replacing the concept.

This study offers a fresh approach to the theory and practice of poetry criticism from a narratological perspective. Arguing that lyric poems share basic constituents of narration with prose fiction, namely temporal sequentiality of events and verbal mediation, the authors propose the transgeneric application of narratology to the poetic genre with the aim of utilizing the sophisticated framework of narratological categories for a more precise and complex modeling of the poetic text. On this basis, the study provides a new impetus to the neglected field of poetic theory as well as to methodology. The practical value of such an approach is then demonstrated by detailed model analyses of canonical English poems from all major periods between the 16th and the 20th centuries. The comparative discussion of these analyses draws general conclusions about the specifics of narrative structures in lyric poetry in contrast to prose fiction.

This anthology presents the results of the Second International Colloquium of the Narratology Research Group (Hamburg University). It engages in the exploration of approaches that broaden Narratology's realm. The contributions illustrate the transcendence of traditional models common to Narratology. They also reflect on the relevance of such a 'going beyond' as seen in more general terms: What interrelation can be observed between re-definition of object domain and re-definition of method? What potential interfaces with other methods and disciplines does the proposed innovation offer? Finally, what are the repercussions of the proposed innovation in terms of Narratology's self-definition? The innovative volume facilitates the inter-methodological debate between Narratology and other disciplines, enabling the conceptualization of a Narratology beyond traditional Literary Criticism.

The study broadens the perspective of narratology to include the objects and methods of historiography, in particular those of the famous French Annales School (rejection of history as events etc). The question is one of the extent to which historiography itself 'creates' history in its narration and of whether, given the inherent narrative character of every historiography, any progress at all can be made in historical knowledge. Rüth not only develops the theoretical backgrounds and discourses of his enquiry, but also uses texts from the Annales School to undertake a detailed study of the narrative element in historiography.

By redefining established topics of narratology, research has become highly diversified. The contributions to this volume neither synthesize developments nor work from shared postulates, but represent a fresh look at ongoing issues. Some scrutinize focalisation in a linguistic framework or in a poststructuralist vein; others take on reliable and unreliable narration in a pronominal perspective or the "unaddressed" reader who upsets the tidy schemes of narrative communication. Also outlined are a possible worlds approach to narrative time, a systematic treatment of metanarrative and a transgeneric application of narratology to poetry. The sequential ordering of narratives as a way of controlling reader response is examined in one article and in another is seen to elicit intertextual configurations. Both divergent and complementary, the contributions seek to integrate into narratological categories and methods the dynamic processes of narrative itself.

The study examines how figures are presented in narrative texts. Using modern theories from the cognitive sciences, the author examines the special status of figures as humanlike constructs. The basis is provided by a theory of narrative communication which attempts to account for cultural and historical change in figures and their representation.

“Computing Action” takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to the concept of action, ranging from analytical to transcendental and finally constructivist definitions. This leads to the formulation of a new model of action, in which the core definitions developed in traditional structuralist narratology and Greimassian semiotics are reconceptualised in the light of constructivist theories.
In the second part of the study, the combinatory model of action proposed is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. Two specialised literary computing tools were developed for the purposes of this investigation of textual data: EVENTPARSER, an interactive tool for parsing events in literary texts, and EPITEST, a tool for subjecting the mark-up files thus produced to a combinatory analysis of the episode and action constructs they contain.
The third part of the book presents a case study of Goethe's “Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten”. Here, the practical application of theory and methodology eventually leads to a new interpretation of Goethe's famous Novellenzyklus as a systematic experiment in the narrative construction of action - an experiment intended to demonstrate not only Goethe's aesthetic principles, but also, and more fundamentally, his epistemological convictions.

“What Is Narratology?” sees itself as contributing to the intensive international discussion and controversy on the structure and function of narrative theory. The 14 papers in the volume advance proposals for determining the object of narratology, modelling its concepts and characterising its status within cultural studies.

The vision of virtual reality aims to create digital realms indistinguishable from our physical world, propelled by innovations aiming at complex environments and multisensory designs. Immersive Technologies are evolving to include touch, smell, and kinesthetic senses into digital experiences. Early attempts at integrating secondary senses into narratives, such as Hans E. Laube's Odorated Talking Pictures in 1940 and the fictional multisensory cinema in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, highlight a shift from traditional sensory narratives. This publication seeks to delve into the underexplored area of multisensory storytelling, inspired by Morton Heilig's The Cinema of the Future, exploring how narratives can engage multiple senses to create immersive experiences. It calls for a theoretical exploration of sensory stimuli's narrative potential and their integration, alongside the materiality of media. A methodological approach involving the archaeology of past media, current innovations,and future visions aims to challenge the audiovisual narrative paradigm, advocating for a multisensory storytelling evolution. Contributions are invited on topics including historical and current non-technical sensual narratives, technical media advancements, utopias of multisensory narration, and theoretical frameworks for multisensory storytelling, encouraging a comprehensive exploration of multisensory narrative possibilities.