“Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges provides entertaining and instructive insights into the issues at stake in consolidating unnatural narratology.” —Paul Dawson
Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges offers a number of developments, refinements, and defenses of key aspects of unnatural narrative studies. The first section applies unnatural narrative theory and analysis to ideologically charged areas such as feminism, postcolonial studies, cultural alterity, and subaltern discourse. The book goes on to engage with and intervene in theoretical debates in several areas of both critical theory and narrative theory, including affect studies, immersion, narration, character theory, frames, and theories of reception and interpretation. Antimimetic perspectives are also extended to additional fields, including autobiography, graphic narratives, drama and film, performance studies, and interactive gamebooks. Written by an international assemblage of distinguished and emerging narrative scholars and theorists, this collection promises to greatly enhance the study of narrative and further advance the frontiers of narrative theory.
Jan Alber is Professor of English Literature and Cognitive Studies at RWTH Aachen University and co-editor of A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (OSU Press, 2013).
Brian Richardson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (OSU Press, 2015) and A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (OSU Press, 2019).
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Jan Alber and Brian Richardson
Chapter 1 (Un)Natural Connections: Feminist Experimentation and Unnatural Narration in Nights at the Circus
Catherine Romagnolo
Chapter 2 Anima by Wajdi Mouawad: Unnatural or Naturalized?
Sylvie Patron
Chapter 3 Unnatural Narrative in a Postcolonial Context: Impossibilities in Aboriginal Australian Fiction
Dorothee Klein
Chapter 4 Empathy the Long Way ’Round: Unnatural Autographic Narration
Christopher D. Kilgore
Chapter 5 Metalepsis and Emotion in Unnatural Stories
Daniel Punday
Chapter 6 The (Un)Natural Response: Reading Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa
Roy Sommer
Chapter 7 Transcending Humanistic and Cognitive Models: Unnatural Characters in Fiction, Drama, and Popular Culture
Brian Richardson
Chapter 8 (Un)Natural Temporalities in Graphic Narratives
Raphaël Baroni
Chapter 9 The Unnatural Conventions of the Interactive Gamebook
Paul Wake
Afterword
Jan Alber and Brian Richardson
List of Contributors
Index
