The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories

A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. Attending to literary, digital, visual, cinematic, televisual, and aural forms of storytelling, this book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with senior and emerging scholars.

This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies which have been appearing in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. From mind-centred and philosophical approaches to theories focusing on gender, race, and sexuality, the chapters touch on poetry, drama, digital games, podcasts, coding, speculative fiction, the law, medical narrative, oral storytelling, and comics as well as the more traditional areas of fiction, TV, and film. This is the future of narrative theory.

Key Features:

• Includes popular culture genres (comics, video games, coding) not covered in depth in other companions to narrative theory
• Showcases essays on narrative dimensions of law, medical ethics, linguistics, and philosophy as well as more obviously narrative genres
• Attention given to race, gender, sexuality distributed throughout the volume, not isolated in a single section
• New essays by superstars in narrative theory (Phelan, McHale, Lanser, Richardson, Abbott, Currie) as well as other well respected and emerging scholars