The study of unnatural narrativeshas become an important, but still disparate new research program in narrative theory. This collection of essays presentsand discusses the new analytical tools that have so far been developed on the basis of unnatural novels, short stories, and plays and extends these findings through analyses of testimonies, comics, graphic novels, films, and oral narratives. Taken together, the essays develop new modeling systems which are designed to capture the strangeness and extravagance of unnatural narratives.

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A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative offers a collection of foundational essays introducing the reader to the full scope of unnatural narrative theory: its meaning, its goals, its extent, its paradoxes. This volume brings together a distinguished group of international critics, scholars, and historians of literature that includes several of the world's leading narrative theorists. Together, they survey many basic areas of narrative studies from an unnatural perspective: story, time, space, voice, minds, narrative levels, realism, nonfiction, hyperfiction, and narrative poetry. Rarely have these...

This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.