Editor's Introduction

The current issue represents a double issue, as it includes a special section on narrative and ideology, guest-edited by Jan Alber, along with three other essays and a book review. Together, all twelve essays presented in this issue are concerned with the relationship between narrative and the world, between a narrative content of representation and the manner of representation.

First, a word about the special section. In the past, Storyworlds has published guest-edited issues in an attempt to host more focused and complex investigations of particular topics, approached by several scholars from different angles. The special section on narrative and ideology engages with the question of ideology and its special, multi-layered connection to narrative. We have recently seen an increased interest in the relationship between narrative and ideology. In the 2018 collection of essays Ideology and Narrative, there is a strong emphasis on postcolonial narratives as a cultural site where ideology matters deeply. As Jan Alber explains, narratives allow us, as readers, to construct a set of beliefs and values (whether we attribute them to the characters or also to author-narrators broadly conceived) behind the story itself, and these beliefs and values are part of larger ideological systems. In this sense, narratives are deeply connected to ideologies without being reductively ideological. On the whole, the section on narrative and ideology subscribes largely, as Alber points out, to the assumption of intentionalism. I refer the readers to Alber's elegant explanation of intentionalism in his introductory essay, but I also add to that David Herman's important observation that "the process of narrative understanding involves a strategic, always only partial mapping of textual cues onto storyworld dimensions, with the relative salience of textual affordances also being shaped by the particular uses to which the narrative is being put" (2013: 48).

In reading stories, we read mind-sets and the worlds they envision. We make assumptions about the reasons behind a choice of character, description, or sequence of events. When we look at the storyworld through the eyes of a particular character, we understand, empathize with, and potentially approve, if not even adopt the behaviors and convictions of, that character. As Alber explains, "We do not merely engage in processes of mind reading to understand the minds of the characters; rather, we also construct a mind or consciousness behind the narrative as a whole. . . . [W]e then form hypotheses about this mind's intentions or what one might call the narrative's potential 'point'—and this 'point' is motivated by certain belief systems or ideologies" (12). The special section presented here covers a wide range of narrative texts to examine how particular narrative strategies in certain broader discursive contexts can achieve an ideological effect. The focus of the special section is not solely on literary texts, so this is not an effort at understanding the ideological function of literature (which has, of course, been already abundantly examined).

One reason we are pleased to feature this special section is that, in keeping with the mission of the journal, it offers a nuanced and comprehensive illustration of narratogical analysis focused on formal but also contextual aspects of "generic textual structures," to use Dan Shen's phrase (2003: 147). Traditionally, narratology has focused on what Alber here calls "decontextualized structural properties" of a text (emplotment, e.g., could be considered such a property). More recent scholarship has made it clear that the "contextualized ideological belief systems," to use again one of Alber's apt phrases, ultimately determine not only the choice of a particular narrative technique. To understand the ideological force of a narrative, we must attend to rich contextualization as well as thick descriptions of technique and form. The essays in this special section are exemplary in this regard. We hope that together, they will leave the reader pondering carefully the claim that systems of belief and textual features reinforce each other as they make it possible to access storyworlds and the mind-sets behind them.

The rest of this issue elaborates and further tests this claim, starting with David Shumway's article, in which the author reflects...