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    Optional-Narrator Theory
    Principles, Perspectives, Proposals

    Sylvie Patron (Edited by)

    9781496223371

    Hardback, published 1 February 2021

    318 pages, 3 illustrations, index
    22.9 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm, 0.628 kg

    “This is a strong contribution to a centrally important concept of narrative theory. The essays provide quite rich and varied reasons to question the assumption that every narrative has a narrator, and Sylvie Patron gives a detailed account of the background to this debate in her introduction. Her account is clear, thorough, indeed magisterial.”-Ann Banfield, author of Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction

    Twentieth-century narratology fostered the assumption, which distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories, that all narratives have a narrator. Since the first formulations of this assumption, however, voices have come forward to denounce oversimplifications and dangerous confusions of issues. Optional-Narrator Theory is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the narrator from the perspective of optional-narrator theories.

    Sylvie Patron is a prominent advocate of optional-narrator theories, and her collection boasts essays by many prominent scholars-including Jonathan Culler and John Brenkman-and covers a breadth of genres, from biblical narrative to poetry to comics. This volume bolsters the dialogue among optional-narrator and pan-narrator theorists across multiple fields of research. These essays make a strong intervention in narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives. This topic is an important one for narrative theory and thus also for literary practice.

    Optional-Narrator Theory advances a range of arguments for dispensing with the narrator, except when it can be said that the author actually “created” a fictional narrator.
     
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