Pier, Philippe Roussin, and the members of “Narratologies contemporaines” seminar of Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL); and Richard Walsh and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies in York, UK. Being able to present and discuss my work in these venues with these theorists has been invaluable. I am grateful to Nancy Stewart for editorial advice. I thank my department chairs, Kent Cartwright and William Cohen, for their generous intellectual and material support of my work. I greatly appreciate a fellowship from the Institute of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University and a RASA grant provided by the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities that enabled me to complete this volume. I offer a special homage to editors Sandy Crooms and Malcolm Litchfield and to the magnificent staff at The Ohio State University Press, in particular managing editor Tara Cyphers; every aspect of working with them has been a great pleasure.

I am grateful for many helpful suggestions from the anonymous reader for the Ohio State University Press and to series editors James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz for their characteristically superb comments, suggestions, and editing. I especially wish to thank two colleagues who have been central to the development of unnatural narrative theory: Jan Alber, the principal organizer of the first conference on unnatural narratology, who read and discussed earlier versions of several chapters of this work. I am greatly indebted to his astute comments, theoretical acuity, personal generosity, and wonderful collegiality. I also thank Henrik Skov Nielsen for careful readings of two chapters and many helpful discussions of my work, often in Aarhus. I express my gratitude to both, brilliant scholars and wonderful collaborators, whose superb work, intellectual insight, and personal friendships have been extraordinarily helpful. Finally, I thank the following presses for allowing me to reprint material, earlier versions of which appeared in their pages: de Gruyter for pages from “Unnatural Voices in Ulysses: Joyce’s Postmodern Modes of Narration” in Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, edited by Per Krogh Hansen, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Rolf Reitan that are included in chapter 6 and for “What Is Unnatural Narrative Theory?” from Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze; some of this material now appears in chapters 1, 2, and the conclusion. I thank the University of Nebraska Press for the right to reprint several paragraphs from Storyworlds in chapter 4, Modern Philology for the section on Macbeth in chapter 5, the University of Texas Press for material