Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices(Frontiers of Narrative)

George Eliot wrote that "man cannot do without the make-believe of a beginning." Beginnings, it turns out, can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The international and interdisciplinary scope of these essays, representing every major theoretical perspective-including feminist, cognitive, postcolonial, postmodern, rhetorical, ethnic, narratological, and hypertext studies-extends from classic literary fiction to nonfictional discourse to popular culture. The authors, respected scholars and emerging critics, ask what conventions structure our understanding of beginnings before we encounter them; how best to analyze and comprehend beginnings in historical, traditional, and postmodern works; and how endings are (often unexpectedly) related to beginnings. The contributors use historical, political, narratological, and psychological frameworks to pursue these and related questions in works by Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Manuel Puig, Salman Rushdie, Julia Alvarez, and feminist hypertext fiction. Together their essays comprise the single most important volume for theorizing about and understanding narrative beginnings.

Table of Contents:
Editor's Preface 000 Acknowledgments 000 Introduction: Narrative Beginnings 000 Brian Richardson Part 1. Origins, Paratexts, and Prototypes 000 1. To Begin with the Beginning: Birth, Origin, and Narrative Inception 000 Niels Buch Leander 2. Before the Beginning: Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the Preface 000 Marilyn Edelstein 3. Stories, Wars, and Emotions: The Absoluteness of Narrative Beginnings 000 Patrick Colm Hogan 4. September 1939: Beginnings, Historical Narrative, and the Outbreak of World War II 000 Philippe Carrard Part 2. Beginnings in Narrative Literature 000 5. "The More I Write, the More I Shall Have to Write": The Many Beginnings of Tristram Shandy 000 Tita Chico 6. Virginia Woolf and Beginning's Ragged Edge 000 Melba Cuddy-Keane 7. A Theory of Narrative Beginnings and the Beginnings of "The Dead" and Molloy 000 Brian Richardson 8. Heartbreak Tango: Manual Puig's Counter-Archive 000 Carlos Riobo 9. Lost Beginnings in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children Gaura Shankar Narayan 000 10. Recessive Origins in Julia Alvarez's Garcia Girls: A Feminist Exploration of Narrative Beginnings 000 Catherine Romagnolo 11. Curtain Up? Disrupted, Disguised, and Delayed Beginnings in Theater and Drama 000 Ryan Claycomb 12. Where to Begin? Multiple Narrative Paths in Web Fiction 000 Jessica Laccetti Part 3. Beginnings and/as Endings 000 13. The Beginning of Beloved: A Rhetorical Approach 000 James Phelan 14. Connecting Links: Beginnings and Endings 000 Armine Kotin Mortimer 15. "Mr. Betwixt-and-Between": The Politics of Narrative Indeterminacy in Stevenson's Kidnapped and David Balfour 000 Oliver Buckton 16. Maculate Reconceptions 000 Susan Winnett Further Reading on Narrative Beginnings 000 Contributors 000 Index 000

About the Author :
Brian Richardson is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction and Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, and the editor of Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Plot, Time, Closure, and Frames. Contributors: Oliver Buckton, Philippe Carrard, Tita Chico, Ryan Claycomb, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Marilyn Edelstein, Patrick Colm Hogan, Jessica Laccetti, Niels Buch Leander, Gaura Shankar Narayan, Armine Kotin Mortimer, James Phelan, Carlos Riobo, Brian Richardson, Catherine Romagnolo, and Susan Winnett.