By redefining established topics of narratology, research has become highly diversified. The contributions to this volume neither synthesize developments nor work from shared postulates, but represent a fresh look at ongoing issues. Some scrutinize focalisation in a linguistic framework or in a poststructuralist vein; others take on reliable and unreliable narration in a pronominal perspective or the "unaddressed" reader who upsets the tidy schemes of narrative communication. Also outlined are a possible worlds approach to narrative time, a systematic treatment of metanarrative and a transgeneric application of narratology to poetry. The sequential ordering of narratives as a way of controlling reader response is examined in one article and in another is seen to elicit intertextual configurations. Both divergent and complementary, the contributions seek to integrate into narratological categories and methods the dynamic processes of narrative itself.

This anthology brings together essential essays on major facets of narrative dynamics, that is, the means by which "narratives traverse their often unlikely routes from beginning to end." It includes the most widely cited and discussed essays on narrative beginnings, temporality, plot and emplotment, sequence and progression, closure, and frames. The text is designed as a basic reader for graduate courses in narrative and critical theory across disciplines including literature, drama and theatre, and film. Narrative Dynamics includes such classic exponents as E. M. Forster on story and plot; Vladimir Propp on the structure of the folktale; R. S. Crane on plot; Boris Tomashevsky on story, plot, and, motif; M. M. Bakhtin on the chronotope; and Gerard Genette on narrative time. Richardson highlights essential feminist essays by Nancy K. Miller on plot and plausibility, Rachel Blau Duplessis on closure, and Susan Winnett on narrative and desire. These are complimented by newer pieces by Susan Stanford Friedman on spatialization and Robyn Warhol on serial fiction. Other major contributions include Edward Said on beginnings, Hayden White on historical narrative, Peter Brooks on plot, Paul Ricoeur on time, D. A. Miller on closure, James Phelan on progression, and Jacques Derrida on the frame. Recent essays from the perspective of cultural studies, postmodernism, and artificial intelligence bring this collection right up to the present.

This revised and expanded handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction and creative writing, with refreshed references and new discussions of cognitive approaches to narrative, nonfiction, and narrative emotions.

Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

. . . this is a first rate book. It draws on a wide range of reading philosophy, economics and politics and teases out a number of important ideas. . . for academics and postgraduates it surely will be essential reading and I think has pushed the study of public policy forward. Michael Connolly, Political Studies Review In The Dynamics of Public Policy, Adrian Kay sets out the crucial methodological, theoretical and empirical implications of two important trends in the social sciences: a frequently expressed ambition for analysis of movies not stills and the regular observation that policy, politics and governance is becoming more complex. Beginning with a discussion of the centrality of temporality, change and history to the social sciences, he develops the provocative claim that existing models of the policy process are of limited value in understanding and explaining policy dynamics. Instead, the author argues that it is only through structured narratives that we can really understand and explain complex policy histories. He sets out a methodology for structuring policy narratives and illustrates the claims of the book through four detailed case studies: health policy and pharmaceutical regulation in the UK; and agricultural policy and budget policy in the EU. Adrian Kay s book will appeal to academics in the fields of policy analysis, public administration and public sector management as well as political science and political theory.

Individually, these articles approach narrative from various angles, focusing both on matters that have been debated since even before the advent of narratology and on questions that have been dealt with in only a limited way in the past; together, they show that narratology, far from being a method defined by fixed procedures, is diverse in its theoretical orientations and analytical practices and responsive to the evolution of literary theory and criticism. Model-building inherent in all forms of narratological research has taken on a less monolithic character as researchers in the field have sought to account for the multiplicity of the fine points of literary expression that the highly differentiated corpus of narratives provides. It may well be appropriate to view work being done in narratology today as a new chapter in the study of how narrative contents, narrative signifiers and their configurations and the dynamics of narrative deployment interact. The articles in this volume are offered as a contribution to the writing of this new chapter.