Why have theorists approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect? Mark Currie argues that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future are vital for an understanding of narrative and its effects in the world. In a series of arguments and readings, he offers an account of narrative as both anticipation and retrospection, linking fictional time experiments (in Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift) to exhilarating philosophical themes about presence and futurity. This is an argument that shows that narrative lies at the heart of modern experiences of time,...

Difference is one of the most influential critical concepts of the second half of the 20th century. In this text, Mark Currie offers a comprehensive account of the history of the term and its place in some of the most influential schools of theory since the 1960s. The text encompasses topics such as: post-structuralism; deconstruction; new historicism; psychoanalysis; French feminism; and postcolonialism. Employing literary case studies throughout, the book aims to provide an accessible introduction to a term at the heart of modern critical idiom.

Explores the relationship between unexpected events in narrative and life
Focusing on surprise, spontaneous eruption and the unforeseeable, The Unexpected argues that stories help us to reconcile what we expect with what we experience. Though narrative is often understood a recapitulation of past events, the book argues that the unexpected and the future anterior, a future that is already complete, are guiding ideas for new understandings of the reading process. It also points beyond that to some of the key temporal concepts of our epoch, of unpredictability, the event, the untimely and...