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Advances a new, inclusive, and varied framework for understanding narrative as a product of interplay between authors, audiences, and texts.

In centering the interplay between authors and audiences as the foundation for the narrative act, the innovative and varied collection Narrative Co-Construction makes a resounding argument for the importance of making space for attending to world-building both within the world of the story and out in the world of the audience. Drawing from a range of theoretical orientations, contributors advance a framework that allows multiple points of entry to a given story and welcomes intersectional approaches, both in terms of the embodied identities of its critics and in terms of the theoretical tools they use to identify the methodologies currently active within narrative theory.

Analyzing texts by Jane Austen, André Gide, Mark Z. Danielewski, Ruth Ozeki, Ocean Vuong, and others, as well as interviews and digital (epi)texts, contributors put co-construction in dialogue with digital media studies, empirical studies, cognitive theories, literary history, literary geography, narrative criminology, and more. This inclusive approach puts different viewpoints, identities, and intellectual allegiances in conversation and asserts the value of making context and intersectionality explicit when examining narrative. By highlighting the author-audience collaboration at the heart of narrative vitality, Narrative Co-Construction deepens our understanding of narrative’s world-building power and celebrates how fictions engage readers.

Contributors:
Helen H. Davis, Malcah Effron, Erika Gotfredson, Lindsay Holmgren, Isabell Klaiber, Margaret Love, Margarida McMurry, Rae Muhlstock, Virginia Pignagnoli, Lois Presser, Alexander Scherr, Siim Sorokin, Martha Swift, Anna Torvaldsen, Katherine Weese

Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts explores new dynamics created by the intersection of digital media and contemporary fiction, arguing that these synergies are part of the cultural context in which the post-postmodernist novel emerges. Virginia Pignagnoli introduces a rhetorical theory of paratexts meant to reshape traditional views of paratextuality, providing categories, functions, and properties able to accommodate new digital practices, such as those of digital epitexts (authors’ social media posts and novels’ websites, for example), that widen the space for authorial creation and narrative exchange beyond the print novel. Focusing on the effects digital epitexts have on audiences, Pignagnoli presents an analysis of contemporary novels—by Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Catherine Lacey, Meg Wolitzer, and Dave Eggers—that display a post-postmodern sensitivity in dialogue with some of the ways digital epitexts are currently employed. Ultimately, in showing how twenty-first-century novels and digital epitexts are co-constitutive, Pignagnoli offers a vision of a new post-postmodernism interested in sincerity, relationality, and intersubjectivity.