Narrative Progression in the Short Story

One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters that he sees as crucial to creating narrative progression and expectation. The book will be of interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and short story scholars.

Marlies Gabriele Prinzl, University College London, on Linguist List 22.1500, 2011:
With this book, Toolan offers a valuable contribution to the field of corpus stylistics. It is a dense work that is probably not aimed at novices, but is of interest to researchers with at least some background knowledge of corpus tools and/or narratology. It should persuade at least some readers that using tools from corpus linguistics can benefit and expand literary studies, both in terms of speeding up text processing, as well as by raising new and important questions about narrative progression and narratology more generally. Toolan's stance is moderate and sensible: he does not consider corpus tools as the be-all and end-all, but equally emphasises the role of the human analyst in evaluating electronic data.