My books in narrative theory form part of a larger project. My first volume, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (1997), is primarily about fictional worlds; its emphasis was on characters’ interpretations of the kind of universe they inhabit and what laws—supernatural, naturalistic, chance, or metafictional—govern its causal setting. My next monograph, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006), explored and analyzed a large range of unusual and impossible narrators and acts of narration, including second-person, “we” narration, multi-person, and realistically impossible kinds of narration. A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019), moves on to the stories themselves, how they are fabricated and how they unfold, analyzing narrative beginnings, sequencing, endings, and the definition of narrative itself. Open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22468. It thus presents another base or pillar in an interconnected account of fictional worlds, narration, and story. My future work will engage with the theory of character; some of these ideas are expressed in the article on unnatural characters in my co-edited anthology, Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges (2020) 135-64.
In the jointly authored volume, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Current Debates (2012), David Herman, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, Robyn Warhol, and I each provide a condensed overview of our positions on several subjects: authors and narrators, story and temporality, narrative space, characters, readers and reception, and narrative and aesthetic value. I have also put together a volume that elucidates the general theory and outlines the history of what I call antimimetic or unnatural narratives: Unnatural Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice (2015). This book also includes a chapter on unnatural narratives in feminist, U. S. Ethnic, and postcolonial narratives. Several of my essays on other topics of narrative and critical theory are being collected together in Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts (2021). These concepts are the role of the author, the significance of the implied author, the elements of unnatural narrative theory, the role of lists in relation to narrative proper, the politics of narrative forms, the possibility of a narratology of drama, the paradoxes of realism, the case for multiple implied readers, and the nature of fictionality. My latest book is a study of the effects of reading on characters in modernist fiction and the corresponding role of the intended reader of that fiction; it is entitled, The Reader in Modernist Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). It explores the often disastrous fates of characters who are uncritical readers in works by Conrad, Ford, Joyce, Mansfield, Woolf, Wharton, Faulkner, Porter, Greene, and Ellison. My book in progress, Conrad’s Narrative and the Making of Modernist Fiction, reads Conrad’s fiction through the lens of postclassical narrative theory.
In the jointly authored volume, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Current Debates (2012), David Herman, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, Robyn Warhol, and I each provide a condensed overview of our positions on several subjects: authors and narrators, story and temporality, narrative space, characters, readers and reception, and narrative and aesthetic value. I have also put together a volume that elucidates the general theory and outlines the history of what I call antimimetic or unnatural narratives: Unnatural Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice (2015). This book also includes a chapter on unnatural narratives in feminist, U. S. Ethnic, and postcolonial narratives. Several of my essays on other topics of narrative and critical theory are being collected together in Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts (2021). These concepts are the role of the author, the significance of the implied author, the elements of unnatural narrative theory, the role of lists in relation to narrative proper, the politics of narrative forms, the possibility of a narratology of drama, the paradoxes of realism, the case for multiple implied readers, and the nature of fictionality. My latest book is a study of the effects of reading on characters in modernist fiction and the corresponding role of the intended reader of that fiction; it is entitled, The Reader in Modernist Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). It explores the often disastrous fates of characters who are uncritical readers in works by Conrad, Ford, Joyce, Mansfield, Woolf, Wharton, Faulkner, Porter, Greene, and Ellison. My book in progress, Conrad’s Narrative and the Making of Modernist Fiction, reads Conrad’s fiction through the lens of postclassical narrative theory.