Project MUSE®: Narrative - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/135
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Narrative.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 10 (2002) through current issueLatest Articles: NarrativeTWOProject MUSE®Narrative1538-974X1063-3685Latest articles in Narrative. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Towards a Secular Narratology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980956
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this paper is centrally concerned with the idea of a postcolonial narratology.1 In recent years, scholars of narrative theory have become increasingly interested in how the corpus of postcolonial literature might provide an occasion for the revision of narratological concepts. By the same token, such scholarship, often identified as "postcolonial narratology," implicitly or explicitly makes a case for what narrative theoretical methods can offer to the scholarly study of postcolonial literature. For instance, in one influential work of postcolonial narratology, Monika Fludernik examines "a number of strategies whose use in postcolonial writing successfully underlines the postcolonial or anti-colonial message" using
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/135/image/coversmallTowards a Secular Narratology2026-02-01text/htmlen-USTowards a Secular Narratology2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®969842026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Metalepsis and Historical Temporalities: A Contribution to Diachronic Narratology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980957
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There are two main approaches to the study of narrative form over time: the diachronic and the historical. A recent handbook glosses the difference, writing that "'diachronic' puts emphasis on the idea of development in time, while 'historical' foregrounds the idea of a setting in the past."1 In the strictest sense, the two can be seen as incompatible: The diachronic mode views narratological constructs as trans-historical universals, while the historical approach rejects the validity of these abstractions in favor of a context-specific understanding of form. In this article, however, I adopt both a diachronic and a historical approach. I start by positing a narrative universal—metalepsis—but show that in its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/135/image/coversmallMetalepsis and Historical Temporalities: A Contribution to Diachronic Narratology2026-02-01text/htmlen-USMetalepsis and Historical Temporalities: A Contribution to Diachronic Narratology2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®1335142026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01The Plot Shop: Rereading in the Literary Marketplace
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980958
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For aspiring authors of the interwar period, Writer's Digest was a one-stop shop for all things literary.1 The periodical, which billed itself as "The Largest Circulating Writer's Magazine," served variously as a repository of literary-theoretical musings, a guide to drafting and revising stories, and a forum where readers across the US could commune through letters to the editor.2 Above all, though, it was a marketplace: a space where writing was monetized. Writer's Digest was a bazaar of publishing opportunities large and small, and explicitly aimed to treat literature as a "business"; according to its cover page, the magazine boasted "100 Different Markets in Every Issue!" to which authors could submit their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/135/image/coversmallThe Plot Shop: Rereading in the Literary Marketplace2026-02-01text/htmlen-USThe Plot Shop: Rereading in the Literary Marketplace2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®1475312026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01"Check Out Narratology Maybe": Fictional Imaginaries of AI Narration
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980959
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"Check out narratology maybe. Read some novels and see how they do it. See if you can work up a narratizing algorithm."1 These are words spoken by Devi, a character in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2015 science fiction novel Aurora.2 Devi is recommending narratology to the novel's narrator, who—as the reference to algorithms suggests—is not a human being but an artificial intelligence. More precisely, the narrator is the AI controlling a spaceship headed for the Tau Ceti system, where the crew's descendants are expected to start a human colony. Given the multigenerational span of the trip, the AI has been tasked with producing a "narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars," but it is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/135/image/coversmall"Check Out Narratology Maybe": Fictional Imaginaries of AI Narration2026-02-01text/htmlen-US"Check Out Narratology Maybe": Fictional Imaginaries of AI Narration2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®957262026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Narrative Form and Mentality in Contemporary Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980960
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The issue of the capacity of fiction to represent mentality, though absent from many classical handbooks of narratology, such as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction, Paul Cobley's Narrative or H. Porter Abbot's The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, has already been extensively studied—suffice it to mention the monographs by Dorrit Cohn, David Lodge, Alan Palmer and David Herman.1 The aim of our paper is to re-conceptualize the already recognized techniques whereby narrative fiction presents consciousness within a framework synthesizing the findings of textual, rhetorical, and cognitive approaches to fictional mentality as well as to identify, characterize, and illustrate with examples from contemporary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/135/image/coversmallNarrative Form and Mentality in Contemporary Fiction2026-02-01text/htmlen-USNarrative Form and Mentality in Contemporary Fiction2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®1749372026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Pseudotranslation, Disnarration, and All That Could Have Been (but wasn't)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980961
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why are we, as readers, or perhaps simply as humans, so interested in the parts of stories that don't happen? Those ostensible asides often introduced by a "could have" or "should have?" In the most banal anecdotes recounted over nightly dinners we often pepper them in—small fictions in an otherwise reliable account of the day. Unsurprisingly, these unrealized potentials appear not only in these so-called natural narratives, but in all types of fiction. Authors too, for a host of reasons, are enticed by the appeal of including that which does not occur. In a similar vein, certain authors, not necessarily the same ones just mentioned, are drawn to fictions about their fictions. They slough off the designation of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/135/image/coversmallPseudotranslation, Disnarration, and All That Could Have Been (but wasn't)2026-02-01text/htmlen-USPseudotranslation, Disnarration, and All That Could Have Been (but wasn't)2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®668282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01