Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV)

Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice provides the first extended account of the concepts and history of unnatural narrative. In this book, Brian Richardson, founder of unnatural narrative studies, offers a theoretical model that can encompass antirealist and antimimetic works from Aristophanes to postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative begins with a sustained critique of contemporary narratology, diagnosing its mimetic bias and establishing the need for a more comprehensive account. This new approach results in original theoretical insights into the basic elements of story, such as beginnings, sequencing, temporality, endings, and narrative itself.   Applying these theoretical insights, Richardson also provides a compelling alternative view of the history of narrative. He traces a genealogy of unnatural narratives from ancient Greek and Sanskrit works through medieval and renaissance fiction to eighteenth-century and romantic fiction. The study continues through the twentieth century, discussing the unnatural elements of Ulysses and other early twentieth-century texts, and engages with contemporary fiction by offering an alternative account of postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative makes an essential intervention in narrative theory and an important contribution to the history of the novel.

Literature & Fiction

Brian Richardson

History & Criticism

Ohio State University Press

UNNATURAL VOICES: EXTREME NARRATION IN MODERN AND CONTEMPO (THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV)

Brian Richardson presents a study that explores in depth one of the most significant aspects of late modernist, avant-garde, and postmodern narrative. Unnatural Voices analyzes in depth the creation, fragmentation, and reconstitution of experimental narrative voices that transcend familiar first- and third-person perspectives. Going beyond standard theories that are based in rhetoric or linguistics, this book focuses on what innovative authors actually do with narration. Richardson identifies the wide range of unusual narrators, acts of narration, and dramas with the identity of the speakers in late modern, avant-garde, and postmodern texts that have not previously been discussed in a sustained manner from a theoretical perspective. He draws attention to the more unusual practices of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf as well as the work of later authors like Beckett and recent postmodernists. Unnatural Voices chronicles the transformation of the narrator figure and the function of narration over the course of the twentieth century and provides chapters on understudied modes such as second-person narration, "we" narration, and multiperson narration. It explores a number of distinctively postmodern strategies, such as unidentified interlocutors, erased events, the collapse of one voice into another, and the varieties of postmodern unreliability. It offers a new view of the relations between author, implied author, narrator, and audience and, more significantly, of the "unnatural" aspects of fictional narration. Finally, it offers a new model of narrative that can embrace the many non- and anti-realist practices discussed throughout the book. Brian Richardson is professor of English at the University of Maryland.

Live Art in LA

Taylor&Francis

This book brings together several major essays on foundational topics of narrative studies and the theory of fictionality by one of the preeminent figures of postclassical narrative theory. It reexamines and reconceives the role of the author, the status of implied authors, the model for unnatural narrative theory, the nature of narrative, and the ideological implications of narrative forms. It also explores the status of historical characters in fictional texts, the paradoxes of realism, the presence of multiple implied readers, the role of actual readers, and the question of fictionality. In addition, an appendix offers a useful approach for teaching narrative theory. The book includes analyses of works by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Beckett, Jeanette Winterson, Deborah Eisenberg, and others. Throughout, it argues for a more expansive conception of narrative theory and keen attention to the nature and difference of fiction. This provocative book makes crucial interventions in ongoing critical debates about narrative theory, literary theory, and the theory of fictionality, and is essential reading for all students of narrative.

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Daddy, please send mommy to find me! After years of gut-wrenching struggles, almost a half a million in adoption expenses, months of separation, hours and hours of pleading prayers on our knees and silently in our hearts, this was it, and there she was. The Gathering is the account of an incredibly courageous woman. The Gathering is the story of a mother, with the support of her husband and children, who searched for her missing children in the jungles of the Marshal Islands, the poverty-choked country of Vietnam, and the corrupt country of Haiti. The Gathering is a story of a family that fought and struggled to find their children in the U.S. through private adoptions and state foster-care systems. The Gathering is an incredible story of faith, hope, and miracles. This is their story.

The Gathering

Biographies & Memoirs

Annie Laurie Richardson

Leaders & Notable People

Tate Publishing

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Books by Brian Richardson