Level 7 is the diary of Officer X-127, who is assigned to stand guard at the "Push Buttons," a machine devised to activate the atomic destruction of the enemy, in the country’s deepest bomb shelter. Four thousand feet underground, Level 7 has been built to withstand the most devastating attack and to be self-sufficient for five hundred years. Selected according to a psychological profile that assures their willingness to destroy all life on Earth, those who are sent down may never return. Originally published in 1959, and with over 400,000 copies sold, this powerful dystopian novel remains a horrific vision of where the nuclear arms race may lead, and is an affirmation of human life and love. Level 7 merits comparison to Huxley’s A Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 and should be considered a must-read by all science fiction fans.

In Challenging Canada Gabriele Helms examines novels by Jeannette Armstrong, Joy Kogawa, Daphne Marlatt, Sky Lee, Aritha van Herk, Thomas King, and Margaret Sweatman. As resistance literature, these novels question the idea of a homogeneous Canadian culture based on the idea of "a peaceable kingdom." Helms shows how narrative techniques can contribute to or impede a text's challenges to hegemonic discourses and social injustices; novels become valuable sources for cultural studies because cultural experiences are translated into and meanings are produced by their narrative forms.Challenging Canada is the first book-length study to bring a Bakhtinian approach to bear on Canadian literature. Gabriele Helms develops a cultural narratology to argue that the contemporary Canadian novels in English considered in this book challenge dominant constructions of Canada from positions of difference and resistance, inscribing previously oppressed and silenced voices through dialogic relations. She makes Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism amenable to textual analysis and problematizes its ideological forces by emphasizing elements of struggle and conflict. Challenging Canada rejects dialogism as a normative liberal pluralism and understands the inequality between voices as historically and socially constructed.

Audionarratology is a new 'postclassical' narratology that explores interfaces of sound, voice, music and narrative in different media and across disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on sound studies and transmedial narratology, audionarratology combines concepts from both while also offering fresh insights. Sound studies investigate sound in its various manifestations from disciplinary angles as varied as anthropology, history, sociology, acoustics, articulatory phonetics, musicology or sound psychology. Still, a specifically narrative focus is often missing. Narratology has broadened its scope to look at narratives from transdisciplinary and transmedial perspectives. However, there is a bias towards visual or audio-visual media such as comics and graphic novels, film, TV, hyperfiction and pictorial art. The aim of this book is to foreground the oral and aural sides of storytelling, asking how sound, voice and music support narrative structure or even assume narrative functions in their own right. It brings together cutting-edge research on forms of sound narration hitherto neglected in narratology: radio plays, audiobooks, audio guides, mobile phone theatre, performance poetry, concept albums, digital stories, computer games, songs.

The variety in contemporary philosophical and aesthetic thinking as well as in scientific and experimental research on complexity has not yet been fully adopted by narratology. By integrating cutting-edge approaches, this volume takes a step toward filling this gap and establishing interdisciplinary narrative research on complexity. Narrative Complexity provides a framework for a more complex and nuanced study of narrative and explores the experience of narrative complexity in terms of cognitive processing, affect, and mind and body engagement. Bringing together leading international scholars from a range of disciplines, this volume combines analytical effort and conceptual insight in order to relate more effectively our theories of narrative representation and complexities of intelligent behavior. This collection engages important questions on how narrative complexity functions as an agent of cultural evolution, how our understanding of narrative complexity can be extended in light of new research in the social sciences and humanities, how interactive media produce new types of narrative complexity, and how the role of embodiment as a factor of narrative complexity acquires prominence in cognitive science and media studies. The contributors explore narrative complexity transmitted through various semiotic channels, embedded in multiple contexts, and experienced across different media, including film, comics, music, interactive apps, audiowalks, and ambient literature.

This book examines overlaps, differences, and complementarities between narratology and stylistics, and shows the consequences of this examination for the practical analysis of prose narrative. Narratology identifies discourse as one of its two main objects of study (story being the other), and stylistics, of course, designates style as its concern. Too often, however, work in each of these fields proceeds without attention to developments in the other. This book corrects that situation by looking beneath the superficial similarities between the “discourse” of narratology and the “style” of fictional stylistics. The author shows that the two seemingly interchangeable terms actually refer to different textual elements. For example, both narratology and stylistics identify point of view as an important element of discourse and style, respectively, but each approach conceives of it differently and thus analyzes it differently. This book argues that the different analyses are complementary and shows how they can be brought together. This synthesis leads to richer conceptions of point of view as well as more comprehensive and precise analyses of its functions and effects in individual narratives. For its theoretical and interpretive contributions, this book will appeal to scholars and students in narrative studies, literary stylistics, and literary theory and criticism.

The narrator (the answer to the question “who speaks in the text?”) is a commonly used notion in teaching literature and in literary criticism, even though it is the object of an ongoing debate in narrative theory. Do all fictional narratives have a narrator, or only some of them? Can narratives thus be “narratorless”? This question divides communicational theories (based on the communication between real or fictional narrator and narratee) and noncommunicational or poetic theories (which aim to rehabilitate the function of the author as the creator of the fictional narrative). Clarifying the notion of the narrator requires a historical and epistemological approach focused on the opposition between communicational theories of narrative in general and noncommunicational or poetic theories of the fictional narrative in particular. The Narrator offers an original and critical synthesis of the problem of the narrator in the work of narratologists and other theoreticians of narrative communication from the French, Czech, German, and American traditions and in representations of the noncommunicational theories of fictional narrative. Sylvie Patron provides linguistic and pragmatic tools for interrogating the concept of the narrator based on the idea that fictional narrative has the power to signal, by specific linguistic marks, that the reader must construct a narrator; when these marks are missing, the reader is able to perceive other forms and other narrative effects, specially sought after by certain authors.