Narrative and Culture

Book excerpt: 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