The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. Attending to literary, digital, visual, cinematic, televisual, and aural forms of storytelling, this book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with senior and emerging scholars.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction - Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol
• I. Mind-Centred and Cognitive Approaches to Narrative
• 1. What Does It Mean to Be Mad? Diagnosis, Narrative, Science, and the DSM - H. Porter Abbott
• 2. The Nonhuman in Mind: Narrative Challenges to Folk Psychology - Marco Caracciolo
• 3. Narrative and the Embodied Reader - Suzanne Keen
• 4. The Fully Extended Mind - Karin Kukkonen
• 5. Sense-Making and Wonder: An Enactive Approach to Narrative Form in Speculative Fiction - Merja Polvinen
• II. Situated Narrative Theories
• 6. Cosmopolitanism, Controversy, and Collectivity: Zadie Smith’s Networked Narration - Claudia Breger
• 7. Race and Empathy in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica - Sue J. Kim
• 8. Till Death Do Us Part: Embodying Narratology - Susan S. Lanser
• 9. Digital Intimacies and Queer Narratives - Sam McBean
• 10. The Cinema of the Impossible: Queer Theory and Narrative - Valerie Rohy
• III. Theories of Digital Narrative
• 11. Cinema and the Unnarratability of Computation - Zara Dinnen
• 12. Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability - Rob Gallagher
• 13. Serial as Digital Constellation: Fluid Textuality and Semiotic Otherness in the Podcast Narrative - Ellen McCracken
• 14. UI Time and the Digital Event - Daniel Punday
• IV. Theories of Television, Film, Comics, and Graphic Narrative
• 15. Continued Comics: The New ‘Blake and Mortimer’ as an Example of Continuation in European Series - Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey
• 16. Operational Seriality and the Operation of Seriality - Jason Mittell
• 17. Closer Than They Seem: Graphic Narrative and the Senses - Katalin Orbán
• 18. Episode Five, or, When Does a Narrative Become What It Is? - Sean O’Sullivan
• 19. Media Theory as Narrative Theory: Film Narration as a Case Study - Christian Quendler
• V. Anti-Mimetic Narrative Theories
• 20. Digital Fiction and Unnatural Narrative - Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin
• 21. Lyric Poetry as Anti-Mimetic Bridging in Narratives and Motion Pictures: A Case Study of Affective Response to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) - Stefan Kjerkegaard
• 22. Speculative Fiction, or, Literal Narratology - Brian McHale
• 23. Unnatural Endings in Fiction and Drama - Brian Richardson
• VI. Philosophical Approaches to Narrative
• 24. Narrative and the Necessity of Contingency - Mark Currie
• 25. Local Nonfictionality within Generic Fiction: Huntington’s Disease in McEwan’s Saturday and Genova’s Inside the O’Briens - James Phelan
• 26. The Story of the Law - Ruth Ronen
• 27. The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett - Richard Walsh
• 28. The Body as Medium: A Phenomenological Approach to the Production of Affect in Narrative - Amy Shuman and Katharine Young