Narrative Concepts and Techniques in International Literary Fiction

The omnipresence of narrative in our real-life experience and in the media world makes it a vital and relevant factor for study. This book presents an easily accessible guide to a series of key narrative topics, with concise entries in a transparent format of compact paragraphs allowing quick reference and omitting footnotes and endnotes to aid fluency. It uses throughout a wide range of illustrative examples from Western and non-Western literature, stressing the universal relevance and application of narrative concepts and techniques. These examples are intended to stimulate interest in less familiar, non-mainstream but important texts, and to highlight unsuspected features in more familiar texts. Engaging with texts from Africa and Asia, the Americas and Australasia, as well as from Britain and Europe, it will appeal to students of comparative literature, to creative writers, whose awareness of available techniques and devices can prompt fresh ideas and approaches, and will introduce general readers to new areas of literary experience.

Ken Ireland is a former literature panel tutor at the University of Cambridge. Author of Thomas Hardy: Time and Narrative (2014), Cythera Regained? The Rococo Revival in European Literature and the Arts, 1830-1910 (2006), and The Sequential Dynamics of Narrative (2001), he has taught at universities in the US, Nigeria, and Japan, as well as for the Open University, the universities of London, Essex, and the UEA. He has published many articles and conference papers, and his research interests include international contemporary fiction, comparative literature, narrative theory and transmedia studies.

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