Research & Innovation

The book reexamines and reconceives the role of the author, the status of implied authors, the model for unnatural narrative theory, the nature of narrative, and the ideological implications of narrative forms. It also explores the status of historical characters in fictional texts, the paradoxes of realism, the presence of multiple implied readers, the role of actual readers, and the question of fictionality. In addition, an appendix offers a useful approach for teaching narrative theory.

The book includes analyses of works by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Beckett, Jeanette Winterson, Deborah Eisenberg, and others. Throughout, it argues for a more expansive conception of narrative theory and keen attention to the nature and difference of fiction. This provocative book makes crucial interventions in ongoing critical debates about narrative theory, literary theory, and the theory of fictionality, and is essential reading for all students of narrative.

Read more about Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts.

Summary

Since the rise of the novel, authors have endeavored to represent work. Yet work has been a long-standing representational problem in fiction. Elaine Scarry asks, how does one represent discretely an action that is characterized by its ongoing and repetitive nature? How does one craft engaging plots around the tedium of work? Why would readers want to read about toil during their own respite from it? Even when an occupation serves as shorthand for character or the workplace serves as a central setting, the representation of work itself is only seldom the focus of fictional narrative. Since 1980, an additional representational problem seems to appear. If US fiction concerned with work and labor previously tended to focus on agrarian, manual, and industrial labor, how does it represent work in an era in which the service industries dominate the labor market? Where are work and labor to be found in contemporary fiction? This entry opens with a brief survey of the economic conditions of this period and their effects on working life. It then examines the sectors of the labor market that are most legible in US fiction since 1980: fictions of deindustrialization; office fictions of the downwardly mobile middle class; fictions of the now dominant interactive service industries; fictions of immigration and migration that respond to the transnational movement of labor; and, finally, fictions of tech start-ups and the gig economy that have recently emerged. It concludes that while the representational problem remains, the themes of work and labor endure.

Available in spring 2022.

A case reflection on mobilizing bereavement resources to honor a child at the end-of-life.

Read "An Honorable Ending: Mobilizing Bereavement Resources Amidst a Christmas Tragedy."

Prairie Schooner.

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, ed. Stefan Herbrechter et al., forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.

The medieval period does not prefigure posthumanism as much as it reveals, according to the editors of the inaugural issue of the journal postmedieval, the many “ways in which bodies (human and non-human) and the world have always been emerging together out of various dynamic material processes and fields of interpretation”.

Read more about the article here.

“City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through

“Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

Read Water Under the Bed.

Volume 105, Number 4, October 2021, pp. 505-534.

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Vol. 90, no. 1, Winter/Spring 2022, pp. 22-54.

Read the article here.