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The 35 original essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry. The essays represent all the major critical approaches to narrative - narratological, rhetorical, feminist, post-structuralist, historicist - and investigate and debate the relations among them. In addition, they stretch the boundaries of the field by considering narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine, and in a variety of media, including film, music, and painting. The volume is divided into six parts: competing accounts of the history of the field; examinations of recurrent problems; suggestions for theoretical revisions and innovations; explorations of the relations among form, history, politics, and ethics; analyses of the way narrative operates in different disciplines and in media beyond the written word; and speculations about the future of narrative and of narrative theory.; At the same time, it offers provocative analyses of a wide range of works, both canonical and popular, from the Bible through novels by Dickens, Woolf, and Arundhati Roy on to Bernard Herrmann's film music and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. Among its contributors are many of the leading figures in the field, including such early pioneers as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller, and Gerald Prince Cover -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Narrative Theory -- Prologue -- 1 Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments -- 2 Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present -- 3 Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory -- PART I New Light on Stubborn Problems -- 4 Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother? -- 5 Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches -- 6 Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata -- 7 Henry James and Focalization, '' or Why James Loves Gyp -- 8 What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other -- 9 The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality -- PART II Revisions and Innovations -- 10 Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses -- 11 They Shoot Tigers, Don't They?: Path and Counterpoint in The Long Goodbye -- 12 Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things -- 13 The I'' of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology -- 14 Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film -- 15 Self-consciousness as a Narrative Feature and Force: Tellers vs. Informants in Generic Design -- 16 Effects of Sequence, Embedding, and Ekphrasis in Poe's The Oval Portrait'' -- 17 Mrs. Dalloway's Progeny: The Hours as Second-degree Narrative -- PART III Narrative Form and its Relationship to History, Politics, and Ethics -- 18 Genre, Repetition, Temporal Order: Some Aspects of Biblical Narratology -- 19 Why Won't Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized -- 20 Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House -- 21 Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan's Atonement -- 22 The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and Participatory National Heritage -- 23 The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists -- 24 On a Postcolonial Narratology -- 25 Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception -- 26 In Two Voices, or: Whose Life/Death/Story Is It, Anyway? -- PART IV Beyond Literary Narrative -- 27 Narrative in and of the Law -- 28 Second Nature, Cinematic Narrative, the Historical Subject, and Russian Ark -- 29 Narrativizing the End: Death and Opera -- 30 Music and/as Cine-Narrative or: Ceci n'est pas un leitmotif -- 31 Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative -- 32 I'm Spartacus!'' -- 33 Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth Through a Glass, Darkly -- Epilogue -- 34 Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With the Medium -- 35 The Future of All Narrative Futures -- Glossary
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