• ISBN13: 9780367569730
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: T&F
• Publisher Imprint: Routledge
• Publication Date: January 1, 2022
• Pages: 632
• Original Price: GBP 230.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 1243 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): General

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.

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.