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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Optional-Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals

Optional-Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals

Patron, Sylvie

Hardcover

Series: Frontiers of Narrative

Literary CriticismGeneral Reference

ISBN10: 1496223373
ISBN13: 9781496223371
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Feb 1 2021
Pages: 318
Weight: 1.40
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Twentieth-century narratology fostered the assumption, which distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories, that all narratives have a narrator. Since the first formulations of this assumption, however, voices have come forward to denounce oversimplifications and dangerous confusions of issues. Optional-Narrator Theory is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the narrator from the perspective of optional-narrator theories.

Sylvie Patron is a prominent advocate of optional-narrator theories, and her collection boasts essays by many prominent scholars--including Jonathan Culler and John Brenkman--and covers a breadth of genres, from biblical narrative to poetry to comics. This volume bolsters the dialogue among optional-narrator and pan-narrator theorists across multiple fields of research. These essays make a strong intervention in narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives. This topic is an important one for narrative theory and thus also for literary practice.

Optional-Narrator Theory advances a range of arguments for dispensing with the narrator, except when it can be said that the author actually created a fictional narrator.

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Literary Criticism

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