Narrative and Culture

Narrative and Culture draws together fourteen essays in which leading scholars discuss narrative texts and practices in a variety of media and genres, subjecting them to sustained cultural analysis. The essays cross national borders and historical periods as often and as easily as they traverse disciplinary boundaries, and they examine canonical fiction as well as postmodern media—photography, film, television. The primary subject of these pieces, notes Janice Carlisle, is “the relation between the telling of tales and the engagement of their tellers and listeners in the practices of specific societies.”Contributors: Nina Auerbach, Thomas B. Byers, Jay Clayton, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Mary Lou Emery, Colleen Kennedy, Vera Mark, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Paul Morrison, Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey, John Carlos Rowe, Daniel R. Schwarz, Carol Siegel, Felipe Smith

This wonderful collection is an attempt to explore the meanings of narrative and culture. The editors recognize that these abstract nouns are suspect, mysterious, devious.

Janice Carlisle (Editor) JANICE CARLISLE is a professor of English at Yale University. She is the author or editor of numerous books including Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction and a critical edition of Great Expectations. Daniel R. Schwarz (Editor) DANIEL R. SCHWARZ is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. He is the editor of several works and is the author of fourteen books including Reading Joyce's Ulysses, Imagining the Holocaust, and the recent In Defense of Reading Teaching Literature in the Twenty-first Century.