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This chapter begins from the history of Troilus criticism. It shows that the ‘narrator’, imagined as a fallible character distinct from an omniscient poet, invented by Donaldson in the 1950s, has come to be taken for granted, simplifying the poem and obscuring its exploratory quality. Detailed textual analysis suggests that in Troilus, the metanarrative ‘I‘ relates not to a single fictional narrator but to the poet’s real compositional processes involving claims to inspiration, problems with sources, and appeals to readers. Further analysis demonstrates the impossibility of distinguishing between the story itself and the means by which narration encodes multiple centres of subjectivity in the way it is told. Narrator readings are shown to substitute for Chaucer’s own empathy with Criseyde, the very misogyny against which Chaucer was reacting.

This chapter focuses on Bowen's last, problematical novel, Eva Trout, which has polarized critical opinion. It explains this opinion and reasons for it, then proposes a new reading of it as the climax in an altogether novel structure of Bowen's interest in the figures of mother and child. In the novel's eponymous heroine, Bowen articulates a representation of that impossible figure — the mother who has no child. A radically unsettling experimental fiction, this novel disfigures various figurations in the earlier work in a process of anamorphosis likened to some photographic distortions. In addition, such figures of authority in the earlier work as Henry James are, in this novel, replaced with an extensive consideration of Dickens, as novelist of childhood and writer of the grotesque. Finally, the chapter considers the metanarrative element of the novel, including its engagement with the forms and metaphysics of traditional Christianity.

This chapter explores the ostensible contradiction between Herodotus' allegedly true story of the Persian king Cyrus' rise to power (1.95–130) and the mythical features of the logos itself. Unlike sources that falsely exaggerate Cyrus' status or achievement, Herodotus asserts that he overthrew his maternal grandfather, the Median king Astyages, at the urging of Astyages' vengeful vizier Harpagus. In order to make his account of the historical origins of the Persian empire intelligible, credible, and emotionally engaging for his Hellenic audience, Herodotus uses narrative techniques familiar from Greek myth, especially as inflected by Greek tragedy. Moreover, Herodotus makes truth-telling a distinctive characteristic of the young Cyrus, which enhances the effect of tragic reversal in his final military defeat at the hands of the Massagetae — an episode that Herodotus, lacking unimpeachable sources, conscientiously presents not as the truth, but merely in the ‘most persuasive’ (1.214.5) version known to him.

This chapter discusses the emergence of postmodernism in the 1980s. At a time when all other theoretical systems were retreating somewhat shamefacedly, postmodernism came up from behind to fill in the intellectual void. What attracted social scientists to postmodernism was its denunciation of metanarratives, foundationalism, and essentialism. Going against the received epistemologies, postmodernism challenged the goal of producing universal knowledge and searching for determinate structural identities. Postmodernism derives its staying power from the anti-foundational philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Gilles Deleuze. In fact, the attributes of the postmodern condition along with the concepts associated with it are identical to or supportive of the philosophical values stressed by the anti-foundational agenda.

This chapter clarifies the claims of certain strains of postmodern or post-structural discourse to engage global history without falling back into the sort of universal history that had been practiced by Hegel or Marx. It states that decolonization forced academics to recognize that the increasing economic integration of the globe had not produced a homogenous global culture. It then explains that something like a new, sceptical philosophy of history emerged, in which a variety of new words and phrases—master narrative and metanarrative among them—created narrative forms and political labels for a radical but post-Marxist mode of discourse. However, it expounds that new stories and terms drew far more heavily on the old universal history than many had hoped, breathing new life into the bad, old idea of peoples without history. It clarifies that in the event, both skeptics and speculators converged on a shared narrative in which modernization generated anti-modern social forces.

This chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for the rest of the book. Analytical and lay uses of the concepts of culture and authenticity are explored. This chapter also introduces the author’s use of “singularities” as a way of understanding cultural products as intermediary between gifts and commodities. Ideas about value, embeddedness, and objectification are introduced, in order to facilitate the analysis throughout the coming chapters.

Chapter 5 reviews the genetic metanarrative that underlies not just the narrative of climate skepticism but those found in other issue areas, as well, analogous to the work of literary theorist Vladimir Propp who sought a foundational set of universal plots behind children’s tales. The chapter presents analysis of texts from diverse issue areas (climate skepticism, immigration, the gun lobby) that reveals strong commonalities in plot and structure and allows reconstruction of an elemental or genetic metanarrative that underlies each of these issue areas to uncover foundational themes that speak to social fracturing and societal divisions. As the chapter shows, people’s beliefs about different issues translate to narratives that all have a common underlying plot and are essentially the same story told and retold in varying ways. The implication is that anti-climate science narratives are founded on elemental plots that are not even about science or climate to begin with. Instead, their roots lie deeper in the social fracturing of present-day society.

Chapter Three looks closely at the “commonwealth writings” of the influential, pro-imperial think tank, the Round Table. Written just before and during World War I, these texts were committed to recasting the British Empire as a “Commonwealth of Nations,” in order to counter the English public’s growing association of British imperialism with German expansionism. The group did this by developing an elaborative, historical metanarrative that linked ancient Athens to the Saxons and then to the British Commonwealth, thus occluding and justifying illiberal practices in the British imperial past, reversing the causal relationship between the problem of empire and its solution, and transforming the notion of democratic citizenship into a theory of racial submission. The chapter concludes by examining the way the group set the rhetorical groundwork for an emerging internationalism that remained formally committed to imperialism through the 1960s

This chapter focuses on the roles and functions of the narrator in the compilation. Drawing on previous studies on narrators in medieval literature, by Spearing and Lawson in particular, the narrator as an analytical construct is discussed in detail before its manifestations in the Scottish Legendary are scrutinised. From the very beginning, the poet-narrator fashions himself as both teacher and writer in that he guides his audience’s edification in subtle but effective ways and at the same time showcases his poetic skills, for instance in the digressions. A comparison of the Prologue with other late medieval prologues accentuates the Scottish poet’s idiosyncratic approach.

This chapter discusses the significance of Gaiman's creative disruptions of scripts and schemas in two of his visual retellings for young adults: The Sleeper and the Spindle (2014) and the graphic novel The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999). By weaving the old, well-worn cloth of fairy tale narrative scripts together with new schematics, Gaiman and his collaborators present sometimes radical ideologies clothed in the comfortable garb of rehearsed, longstanding traditions. As much as this action masks the changing cultural attitudes represented by the "new cloth," Gaiman's weavings also reveal to careful readers how narratives become ubiquitous and achieve metanarrativity. To understand how our minds interpret scripts, schemas, and metanarratives, this chapter will bring to bear conceptual blending and schema theories on my examination of the verbal and visual interplay of source texts and Gaiman retellings

Chapter 3 approaches the cinema of Jia Zhangke from two angles: first, a complex mechanism of multivalent and metanarrative subject positions in and beyond the cinematic frame compels the spectator to a highly active and conscious process of taking up history and image critically; second, it proposes the concept of “surface” to highlight Jia’s cinematic texture through various figurations of superficial time and superficial space in Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. Lou Ye’s highly expressionist and kinetic works conflate screen subjectivities with directorial and spectatorial ones. An analysis of two films by Lou Ye, Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly, demonstrates that, despite the two auteurs’ difference in style, they share a highly comparable epistemological interest in the relationship between history, representation and subjectivity.

This chapter shows how a shared conspiracist metanarrative permits people to take conspiracy allegations rooted in the Protocols, sanitize the anti-Semitic references, and peddle the resulting analogs to the political left. It explores the impact that apocalyptic beliefs can have on Protocols-inspired conspiracism in triggering murderous scapegoating, as apocalyptic beliefs dualize all human interactions into good and evil forces. To illustrate, the chapter traces the career of the “Heroic Gnostic” who gains a following and, using scapegoating of the apocalyptic enemy as their major rhetorical trope, launches a movement that moves from the margins to the center. Like Hitler with his “Nationalsozialismus,” the Gnostic hero moves back and forth from right to left, from authoritarian to egalitarian, with ease, making sure at every step to foment violent hatred.

John Henry, the British spy, seemed to understand what it took to move the powerful to action, using secret letters to his handlers in British colonial administration as an incitement to Constitutionally declared war. My discussion here relies on that metanarrative of “abstraction” to produce a conversation between its historical actors. Though Henry wrote his letters on Federalist activities to Sir James Craig, Governor-General of the Canadas, he saved copies for his own use. Ultimately, he found the means to sell them to James Madison in February of 1812, at a moment when the president was equally keen to know of the activities of his political opponents. Madison published the letters almost as soon as he received them. In some sense then, the Henry letters, though addressed to Craig, were written for Madison. And Madison’s own subsequent rhetorical and legal moves towards war came in “conversation” with Henry. Henry abstracts authority and the public so as not to risk the ruin of the fictive and novelistic, but to harness it and its mediational effects. It redefines the relationship between the people and the Constitution, from the irrationally voiced nation, which diffuses authority, to a proper realignment with Presidential power. The move is a containment of the role of individual self-hood in the process of naming national interests and declaring war. In the process, that republican devotion to bottom-up persuasive transparency, idealized in the contemporaneous media of letters, print, and opinion, is critically diminished. He invites us to consider how late eighteenth century networks of information—letters, secret communiqués, war messages to Congress--abstract the self (its “absurd” opinions, its “inconsistent” rationales) to the benefit of a new (masculinized) executive. The executive model of authority will replace the irregular multitude of republican political culture.

This chapter contributes to the literature on rhetorical history as a source of competitive advantage. This literature has shown that managers in a wide range of organizations create historical narratives that are used rhetorically to advance the organization’s goals. The existing literature gives us a limited understanding of the determinants of the rhetorical effectiveness of these historical narratives. This chapter draws on the literature on confirmation basis and the literature on historical metanarratives to understand the factors that influence whether a listener will be persuaded by a manager’s historical narrative. The use of a historical narrative is likely to be strategically efficacious whenever the historical narrative is congruent with the listener’s historical metanarratives and with the ontological and cosmological commitments that underpin the listener’s historical metanarrative. Whether or not the historical narrative is true is far less important in predicting its rhetorical effectiveness.

With chapter 6 having described the way norms for mental-state ascriptions operate in a top-down manner in discourse domains, chapter 7 explores how individual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up impact on the ascriptive norms circulating within particular domains. To this end, the chapter discusses how Thalia Field’s 2010 experimental narrative Bird Lovers, Backyard employs a strategic oscillation between two nomenclatures that can be used to profile nonhuman as well as human behaviors: (1) the register of action, which characterizes behavior in terms of motivations, goals, and projects; and (2) the register of events, which characterizes behavior in terms of caused movements that have duration in time and direction in space. In braiding together these two registers, Field’s text suggests not only how discourse practices can be repatterned, but also how such repatterning enables broader paradigm shifts—in this case shifts in ways of understanding cross-species encounters and entanglements.

This chapter focuses on David and Davidic kingship, especially with regard to the multiple discursive potentials which were highlighted in Chapter 3. David’s story (in its various and dialogic versions) and its discursive import remained multivocal and ambiguous. The key questions are, what kind of story (or, indeed, stories) is David’s? And concomitantly, how did this story or stories contribute to Judah’s social memory of kingship? Instead of limiting the discourse, and rather than attempting to reduce it to a single voice, the contribution of David and Davidic kingship was to encourage and maintain the multivocality, as it was keyed to the mnemonic framework of the Deuteronomic king-law and the doublethought rise of kingship in the first place.

This chapter analyses the cultural, historical, and religious factors that gave rise to the satanic ritual abuse moral panic in the United States during the 1980s and beyond. The moral panic fuelled wrongful allegations against day care providers and led to egregious miscarriages of justice in their criminal proceedings. Notorious cases are used for illustrative and analytical purposes. Such cases include the McMartin Preschool case that triggered the moral panic. The chapter also discusses the spread of the moral panic to the UK and Europe, and discusses the false allegations and miscarriages of justice that it left in its wake.

This chapter considers how social communities arise which are committed to a specific way of understanding or investigating our world, and how they transmit their ideas and values. Particular attention is paid to the notion of ‘epistemic communities’, and how they are able to communicate with each other, despite their different understandings of what it means to be ‘reasonable’. The concept of tradition—meaning a settled understanding of how the world is to be understood and explored—is considered, particularly in relation to the challenge this poses to the idea that reason is something that is historically and culturally invariant.