A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become, the Edinburgh Companion to Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. The book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with established scholars who have made significant changes in the understanding of narrative and younger scholars who are putting narrative theories to use on new media forms and new literatures. This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies (the affective, the posthuman, the cognitive) which have been emerging in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. Narrative genres persist, and they continue to do vital work in the world. Narrative theories provide the vocabulary for talking about how that work gets done.

A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. Attending to literary, digital, visual, cinematic, televisual, and aural forms of storytelling, this book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with senior and emerging scholars. This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies which have been appearing in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. From mind-centred and philosophical approaches to theories focusing on gender, race, and sexuality, the chapters touch on poetry, drama, digital games, podcasts, coding, speculative fiction, the law, medical narrative, oral storytelling, and comics as well as the more traditional areas of fiction, TV, and film. This is the future of narrative theory. Key Features: Includes popular culture genres (comics, video games, coding) not covered in depth in other companions to narrative theory Showcases essays on narrative dimensions of law, medical ethics, linguistics, and philosophy as well as more obviously narrative genres Attention given to race, gender, sexuality distributed throughout the volume, not isolated in a single section New essays by superstars in narrative theory (Phelan, McHale, Lanser, Richardson, Abbott, Currie) as well as other well respected and emerging scholars

Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meta archival meditation, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. Our subject is Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, well known and respected in the Victorian period, strangely obscure in our own. We tell of discovering Scharf's souvenirs of a social life among the highest classes, and then learning he was the self made son of an impoverished immigrant. As we comb through 50 years of daily diaries, we stumble against plots we bring to the archive from our reading of novels. We ask questions like, did Scharf have a beloved? Why did Scharf kick his aged father out of the family home? What could someone like Scharf mean when he referred to an earl as his "best friend"? The answers turn out never to be what Victorian fiction - or Victorianist Studies - would have predicted. Presents a unique approach to life writing that foregrounds the process of archival discovery; a contribution to sexuality studies of the Victorian period that focuses on domestic arrangements between middle class men; offers an intervention into identity studies going beyond class, gender, and sexuality to try out new categories like "extra man" or "perpetual son" and a humorous critique of what literary critics do when they turn to "the archive" for historical authenticity.

Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meditation on archival research, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. This is the story of two literary critics' attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, famous in his day and strangely obscure in our own. After discovering Scharf's scrapbook of menus and invitations from England's most stately homes, the authors began their adventures in the archives of London, searching Scharf's diaries, sketchbooks, and letters for traces of the man who so loved dining out. Addicted to Victorian novels, the authors looked for a marriage plot, but found Scharf's passionate attachment to a younger man who had hidden from him a secret engagement; they looked for a Bildungsroman, but found that Scharf never left his beloved mother. Always short of money, self-educated, talented, irascible, gregarious, prolific, and snobbish, this son of a poor immigrant artist was to become the right-hand man of an earl he called "my best friend." The written record of his nightmares, debts, gifts, and dinner parties comes together to produce a rich Victorian character whose personal and professional lives challenge what we think we know about sex, class, and profession in his time. Helena Michie is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities and Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (2006), Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (1991) and The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (1987) and co-editor with Ronald Thomas of Nineteenth-Century Geographies: From the Victorian Age to the American Century (2002). Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University, where she is a core faculty member of Project Narrative. She is the author of Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop Culture Forms (2003) and Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989) and co-editor with Susan S. Lanser of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015).