Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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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
Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama

Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama

Alber, Jan

Hardcover

Series: Frontiers of Narrative

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0803278683
ISBN13: 9780803278684
Publisher: Univ Of Nebraska Pr
Published: Mar 1 2016
Pages: 330
Weight: 1.40
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today's world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others.

Unnatural Narrative looks at the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or the unnatural throughout British and American literary history. Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory, and possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields for individual readers as well as literary culture. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers' minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement.

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