This handbook is the result of an ambitious, interdisciplinary, and pioneering project, in that it not only opens new horizons for the study of the wide field of factual narratives across disciplines and various media, but it also charts important new trajectories for narrative theory at large. Although narratology has branched out in many interesting and new ways during the past two decades or so, it has traditionally been mainly concerned with literary or narrative fiction rather than with manifestations of narrative in nonfictional domains such as historiography, law, medicine, politics, or sociology. While various domains, forms, and functions of factual or reality-focused narratives have recently received some attention, most notably in a volume entitled Wirklichkeitserzählungen (edited by the German narrative theorists Christian Klein and Matías Martinez in 2009), the wide range of uses of narratives to convey facts and true information have still not been studied as comprehensively and...
Narrative Factuality: A Handbook
Ansgar Nünning is professor of English and American literature and cultural studies and founding director of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and of the European PhDnet Literary and Cultural Studies. His most recent publication is Passages: Moving beyond Liminality in the Study of Literature and Culture (ed., with Elizabeth Kovach and Jens Kugele, 2022). In addition to narrative theory, English and American literature, cultures of memory, and literary and cultural theory, his recent research interests include forms of life and notions of a good life, narratives of slow change (e.g., climate change, mind change, stories of health and illness) and the interfaces between narratives/narrative studies and medicine/salutogenesis.
Ansgar Nünning; Narrative Factuality: A Handbook. Poetics Today 1 September 2023; 44 (3): 495–501. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10578555
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