The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory: (Routledge Literature Companions)

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Narrative Today: Telling Stories in a Post-Truth World Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales) and Maria Mäkelä (Tampere University) I Narrative and Its Others 1. My Story, Your Narrative: Scholarly Terms and Popular Usage Maria Mäkelä (Tampere University) and Samuli Björninen (Tampere University) 2. Non-Narrative Genres: Exposition, Lists, Lyric, etc Monika Fludernik (University of Freiburg) 3. Narrative and Economic Modelling Lindsay Holmgren (McGill University) 4. Data Narratives: Visualization and Interactivity in Representations of Covid-19 Madeleine Sorapure (UC Santa Barbara) II Narrative and the Public Sphere 5. What is ‘the Narrative’? Conspiracy Theories and Journalistic Emplotment in the Age of Social Media Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales) 6. Rodney King, The Fugitive, and the Cogency of Cultural Narratives Alan Nadel (University of Kentucky) 7. Personal Storytelling in Social Movements Francesca Polleta (University of California Irvine) III Narrative and Social Media 8. Co-tellership in Social Media Storytelling Ruth Page (University of Birmingham) 9. (Small) Stories as Features on Social Media: Toward Formatted Storytelling Alex Georgakopoulou (King’s College London) 10. Quantified Storytelling: How the Tellable and the Countable Intermingle on Digital Platforms Alex Georgakopoulou (King’s College London), Stefan Iversen (Aarhus University), and Carsten Stage (Aarhus University) 11. Networks, Interfaces, Digital Media Infrastructure, and Their Implications for Fictional World Theory Dan Punday (Mississippi State University) IV Narrative Truth 12. Legal Facts, Affective Truths, and Changing Narratives in Trials Involving Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo Greta Olson (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen) 13. My Mouth, Your Story: On Co-Witnessing Irene Kacandes (Dartmouth College) 14. Playing Games with the Truth: Tabloid Stories, Urban Legends, Tall Tales, and Bullshit Marie-Laure Ryan (independent scholar) V Narrative and the Novel 15. The Undead Novel: A History of Realism or a History of Prose Fiction? Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales) 16. This is Not a Novel: Some Varieties of Anti-Novel Brian McHale (The Ohio State University) 17. Panexperientiality, Media, and Narrative’s Time Management Problem David Ciccoricco (University of Otago) 18. Chinese Narratology: Tradition, Developments, and Perspectives Biwu Shang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) VI Narrative and Selfhood 19. Life and Narrative Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku) 20. Just the Facts? Nonfictionality and Life Writing Julie Rak (University of Alberta) 21. Toward a Rhetorical Narrative Medicine: Or, Corpus, Close Reading, and the Cases of Oates’s "Hospice/Honeymoon" and Ward’s "On Witness and Respair" James Phelan (The Ohio State University) 22. Reading Celebrity Autofiction: Fictionality, Authorship, and Reader Responses in Narrative Theory Alison Gibbons (Sheffield Hallam University) VII Narrative and Social Change 23. It Gets Better vs. To This Day: Queerness, Causality, Narrativity Jesse Matz (Kenyon College) 24. What Does It Mean to #BelieveWomen? Popular Feminism and Survivor Narratives Tanya Serisier (Birbeck, University of London) 25. Narrating Eighteenth-Century Black Lives: Abolition and the Politics of Form Susan S. Lanser (Brandeis University) VIII Narrative and Cognition 26. Human Cognition and Narrative Form Richard Walsh (University of York) 27. Adaptationism, Postmodernism, and a Biocultural Narratology H. Porter Abbott (University of California, Santa Babara) 28. The Experience of Narrative: Aesthetics and Embodiment Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo) IX Narrative and Complex Systems 29. Video Games as Complex Narratives and Embodied Metalepsis Astrid Ensslin (University of Bergen) 30. Perspectives on Causality in Sciences and Arts: On the Limits and Benefits of Narrative Representation Marina Grishakova (University of Tartu) 31. Concepts and Aspects of an Integrated Narrative Generation Approach Based on Post-Narratology Takashi Ogata (Iwate Prefectural University) 32. Storytelling and Narrative Capital in Organizations: Bringing Boje and Bourdieu into Conversation Klarissa Lueg (University of Southern Denmark) X Narrative and International Relations 33. Narrative in Politics and the Politics of Narrative Monika Barthwal-Datta (University of New South Wales), Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews), and Laura J. Shepherd (University of Sydney) 34. The Narrative Turn in European Studies: A Synergic Approach Luis Bouza Garcia (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Carmen Sancho Guinda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) 35. Migration and Narrative Dynamics Roy Sommer (University of Wuppertal) 36. Deconstructing the ‘Hollow Man’: Visual Narrative Analysis and World Politics Katja Freistein (University of Duisburg-Essen) and Frank Gadinger (University of Duisburg-Essen) XI Narrative and the Environment 37. Fables for Tomorrow: Narrating Net Zero Genevieve Lively (University of Bristol) 38. Storying the Anthropocene: Narrative Challenges and Opportunities in Times of Climate Change Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University) 39. Narrative’s Environments Eric Morel (University of Delaware)

About the Author :
Paul Dawson is the author of two monographs, The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction (2013) and Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005). Paul is also a poet and the author of Imagining Winter (2006). He teaches Literary Studies and Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. Her publications deal with storification and the storytelling boom; the neoliberal logic of narrative and fiction; exemplarity; consciousness, voice, and realism across media; the literary tradition of adultery; authorial ethos; and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.