Synopses & Reviews
Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory in the face of the changing landscape of computer-mediated communication.
New Narratives reflects the diversity of its subject by bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and theorists of digital narratives. It extends the range of digital subgenres examined by narrative theorists to include forms that have become increasingly prominent, new examples of experimental hypertext, and contemporary video games. The collection also explicitly draws connections between the development of narrative theory, technological innovation, and the use of narratives in particular social and cultural contexts.
Finally, New Narratives focuses on how the tools provided by new technologies may be harnessed to provide new ways of both producing and theorizing narrative. Truly interdisciplinary, the book offers broad coverage of contemporary narrative theory, including frameworks that draw from classical and postclassical narratology, linguistics, and media studies.
Review
"Storyworlds across Media offers a diverse and challenging collection of essays. . . . The collection as a whole abundantly proves that a media-conscious narratology is a must if narrative theory wants to keep up with the times."and#8212;Image and Narrative
Review
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Storyworlds across Media fruitfully explores an important new concept in narrative theoryandmdash;the storyworldandmdash;that is of compelling interest across disciplines, from TV writing and popular cultureand#160;to digital media design and artificial intelligence.andrdquo;andmdash;Janet H. Murray, author of
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in CyberspaceReview
and#8220;Storyworlds across Media offers a great deal of insight into the contemporary cultural use of proliferating opportunities (especially in digital media) for innovation in storytelling.and#8221;and#8212;Richard Walsh, author of Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction
Synopsis
The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding mediaand#8212;everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video gamesand#8212;is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society.
Storyworlds across Media explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness?and#160;
The first part of the volume critically assesses the cross- and transmedial validity of narratological concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second part deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality across media. The third part explores the relation between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds, examining emergent forms of storytelling based on multiple media platforms. Taken together, these essays build the foundation for a media-conscious narratology that acknowledges both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate.
and#160;and#160;
Synopsis
Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century explores, with textual specificity and historical alertness, the question of how the cultures of the nineteenth centuryand#8212;the cultures that shaped Willa Catherand#8217;s childhood, animated her education, supplied her artistic models, generated her inordinate ambitions, and gave embodiment to many of her deeply held valuesand#8212;are addressed in her fiction.
In two related sets of essays, seven contributors track within Catherand#8217;s life or writing the particular cultural formations, emotions, and conflicts of value she absorbed from the atmosphere of her distinct historical moment; their ten colleagues offer a compelling set of case studies that articulate the manifold ways that Cather learned from, built upon, or resisted models provided by particular nineteenth-century writers, works, or artistic genres. Taken together with its Cather Studies predecessor, Willa Cather and Modern Cultures, this volume reveals Cather as explorer and interpreter, sufferer and master of the transition from a Victorian to a Modernist America.
About the Author
Ruth Page is a lecturer in English language at the University of Leicester. She is the author of
Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology and
Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. Bronwen Thomas is a senior lecturer in linguistics and literature at the Media School, Bournemouth University, and is the author of
Fictional Dialogue: Speech and Conversation in the Modern and Postmodern Novel (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press).and#160;Contributors include Alice Bell, Paul Cobley, Astrid Ensslin, Brian Greenspan, Nick Haeffner, David Herman, Michael Joyce, Heather Diane Lotherington, Nick Montfort, James Newman, Daniel Punday, Scott Rettberg, Marie-Laure Ryan, Andrew Salway, and Iain Simons.