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This book presents a narratological analysis of the Kaiserchronik, or chronicle of the emperors, an account of the Roman and Holy Roman emperors from the foundation of Rome to the run-up to the Second Crusade that was remarkably popular in medieval Germany. Previous research has concentrated on the structure and sources of the work and emphasized its role as a Christian narrative of history, but this study shows that the Kaiserchronik does not simply illustrate a didactic religious message: it also provides an example of how techniques of story-telling in the vernacular were developed and explored in twelfth-century Germany. Four aspects of narrative are described (time and space, motivation, perspective, and narrative strands), each of which is examined with reference to the story of a particular emperor (Constantine the Great, Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and Henry IV). Rather than dogmatically imposing a single analytical framework on the Kaiserchronik, the book takes account of the fact that modern theory cannot always be applied directly to works from premodern periods: it draws critically on, and where necessary refines, a variety of approaches, including those of Gérard Genette, Boris Uspensky, and Eberhard Lämmert. Throughout the book, the narrative techniques described are contextualized by means of comparisons with other texts in both Middle High German and Latin, so that the place of the Kaiserchronik as a literary narrative in the twelfth century becomes clear.

The contributions to this book illustrate how linguistic study of Greek comedy can deepen our knowledge of the intricate connections between the dramatic texts and their literary and socio-cultural environment. Topics discussed include the relationship of comedy and iambus, the world of Doric comedy in Sicily, figures of speech and obscene vocabulary in Aristophanes, comic elements in tragedy, language and cultural identity in 5th-century Athens, linguistic characterization in Middle Comedy, the textual transmission of New Comedy, and the interaction of language and dramatic technique in Menander. Research in these topics and in related areas is reviewed in a bibliographical essay. While the main focus is on comedy, the book adopts a diversity of approaches (including narratology, pragmatics, lexicology, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and textual criticism).

From Dr. Moreau's Beast People to David Cronenberg's Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem's robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler's human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, this book examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs. New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, this book develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman. Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox. The book draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism.

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and the body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies shows the mutability of the Victorians’ understanding of the human body’s centrality to identity—an understanding made mutable by changes in science, technology, religion, and class. It also demonstrates how that understanding changed along with developing narrative styles: as disability became increasingly medicalized and the soul increasingly psychologized, the mode of looking at deviant bodies shifted from gaping at spectacle to scrutinizing specimen, and the shape of narratives evolved from lengthy multiple-plot novels to slim case studies. Moreover, the book illustrates that, despite this overall linear movement from spectacle to specimen in literature and culture, individual texts consistently reveal ambivalence about categorizing the body, positioning some bodies as abnormally deviant while also denying the reality or stability of normalcy. Bodies in Victorian fiction never remain stable entities, in spite of narrative drives and the social, medical, or scientific discourses that attempted to control and understand them.

This book provides an alternative perspective on organization studies, introducing an approach that draws on narratology, literary theory, cultural studies, and anthropology, contrasting it with the assumptions of the positivist social science. It reflects on such issues as possibility of combining narrative and scientific knowledge, the presence and absence of plot in organization studies, the dominance of the realistic stylization in organization studies, the relationship between organization studies and detective stories, and the challenge of polyphony in organization studies. The aim of the book is to demonstrate how the art of persuasion (as opposed to the simple presentation of facts) can be deployed in social sciences in general and in management and organization studies in particular. Management and organization studies confront the world that is polyphonic and polysemic. The task of the discipline is to render this state of affairs in adequate texts.

How can stories function as expressions of kindness to others, and how might the narratives we live by then affect our behaviour in the world? Is there such a thing as a ‘humanistic drama’? This book attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism, asking how we can use stories to complicate our understanding of others, and questioning the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. With case studies of films like Parenthood (1989), Junebug (2005), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), this original study synthesises leading discourses on media and cognition, evolutionary anthropology, literature and film analysis into a new theory of the storytelling instinct.

This is a full-length study of Jeanette Winterson's work as a whole, containing in-depth analyses of her eight novels and cross-references to her minor fictional and non-fictional works. It establishes the formal, thematic and ideological characteristics of the novels, and situates the writer within the general panorama of contemporary British fiction. Earlier critics usually approached Winterson exclusively either as a key lesbian novelist, or as a heavily experimental and ‘arty’ writer, whose works are unnecessarily difficult and meaningless. By contrast, this book provides a comprehensive, ‘vertical’ analysis of the novels. It combines the study of formal issues – such as narrative structure, point of view, perspective and the handling of narrative and story time – with the thematic analysis of character types, recurrent topoi, intertextual and generic allusions, etc., focused from various analytical perspectives: narratology, lesbian and feminist theory (especially Cixous and Kristeva), Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypal criticism, Tarot, Hermetic and Kabalistic symbolism, myth criticism, Newtonian and Post-Newtonian Physics, etc. Novels that read superficially, or appear simple and realistic, are revealed as complex linguistic artifacts with a convoluted structure and clogged with intertextual echoes of earlier writers and works. The conclusions show the inseparability of form and meaning (for example, the fact that all the novels have a spiralling structure reflects the depiction of self as fluid and of the world as a multiverse) and place Winterson within the trend of postmodernist British writers with a visionary outlook on art, such as Maureen Duffy, Marina Warner or Peter Ackroyd.

This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval verse narratives and lyrics — not how they represent individual subjectivities, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts by means such as deixis. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes detailed analyses of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law’s Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok, King Horn, the lyric sequence of Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and many anonymous lyrics. It also devotes sections to Ovid’s Heroides and to poems by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. For the first time, it brings to bear on medieval narratives and lyrics a body of theory which denies the necessity for literary texts to have narrators or ‘speakers’, and in doing so offers new ways of understanding homodiegesis and reveals the interpretative distortions into which an unquestioning acceptance of the ‘narrator theory of narrative’ has led much of the last century’s criticism. It is intended to appeal not only to medieval specialists, but also to narratologists whose theories have claimed comprehensiveness while neglecting medieval narratives.

Judging from Experience forms part of Law and Literature and/or, more broadly, Law and Humanities, the interdisciplinary movement in legal theory that focuses on the various bonds of law, language and literature. The book presents a view on law as a humanistic discipline. It demonstrates the importance for academic legal theory and legal practice of a iuris prudentia as insighful knowledge of law that helps develop the practitioner’s practical wisdom. In doing so it builds on insights from philosophical hermeneutics ranging from Aristotle to Ricoeur. The building blocks it proposes for law as praxis are indicative of a methodological reflection on interdisciplinary studies in law and the humanities and of the development of legal narratology.The book engages with literary works such as Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and McEwan’s The Children Act to illuminate its arguments and offer a specific European perspective on the topics discussed. The author combines her understanding of legal theory and judicial practice in a continental-European civil-law system, and, within it, in the field of criminal law, to propose a perspective on law as part of the humanities that can inspire both legal professionals and advanced students of law. Thus the book is also a reflection of the author’s combined passions of judicial practice and Law and Literature.

This is a study of unexpected events in narrative, fiction and life. It explores theoretical writings on the subject of surprise, and its broader context in the philosophy of time, and demonstrates the importance of related concepts, such as unpredictability, the event, the untimely and the messianic, in the contemporary world. Narrative is often thought of as the recollection or recapitulation of past events, but this study aims to accentuate questions of expectation, anticipation and futurity in the process of narrative comprehension. It offers an account of narrative temporality based around the twin ideas of surprise and the future anterior, and the necessity of thinking these concepts together. Through readings of theoretical, philosophical and fictional texts, the book explores the proposition that stories have some role in our conceptualization and cognitive control of the future.

Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Willemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive or Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, and, by using the specific category of the ‘impossible puzzle film’, it examines movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind’s blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.

Narrative is an important element in our daily life and the novel is arguably the most popular genre of our times. The theory of narrative or narratology, which was developed in the 1960s, has helped us towards a better understanding of the how and why of narrative. This book provides an introduction to narratology that deals specifically with classical narrative: epic, historiography, biography, the ancient novel, but also the many narratives inserted in drama or lyric. The first part of the volume sketches the rise of narratology, and defines key narratological terms, illustrated with examples from both modern novels and Greek and Latin texts. Among the topics discussed are the identity of the role of narrator and narratees, tales within tales, metalepsis, temporal devices such as prolepsis and analepsis, retardation and acceleration, repetition and gaps, focalisation, and the thematic, symbolic, or characterising functions of space. The second part of the volume offers three close readings of famous classical texts and shows how the interpretation of these texts can be enriched by the use of narratology.