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How Russian Literature Became Great explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders. Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante, Mickiewicz, and more. As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal \"ideal order among themselves\" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down to the present day. The conditions of its era of formation-the prominence of the crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social function, and the equation of literature with national identity-make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members. How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.

Chaologists believe that our actions, albeit small, play prominent roles in shaping the reality which we live in. It is believed that within the chaotic nature of our world, there is a complex system in its randomness. Yet, these seemingly random events have organised patterns such as weather and natural events which may be constantly predicted but they never be completely predetermined. This is the basis of chaos theory which identifies and examines these unseen, disorderly pattern in our world. Similarly, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) tells the story of an unnamed narrator who is trapped in the seemingly disordered string of events. However, there is a point of equilibrium in the unnamed narrator’s life before it branches out into the disequilibrium caused by individuals who influence his string of decision when one reads into the text. By utilising main elements of chaos theory and Tzvetan Todorov’s narrative theory, this study explores the relationship between the strange attractors and the unnamed narrator’s string of decisions. Although the text is narrated in his jumbled train of thoughts, Fight Club’s narrative structure can be reconstructed to provide a clearer look on his gradual descent into chaos. As a result, this study shows that there is a parallelism between narratology and quantum physic theory and the possibility to incorporate them in analysing the narrative structure of literature.

This article advances a narrative approach to internet memes conceptualized as partial stories that reflect, capture, and contribute to wider storylines. One key difficulty in studying memes as stories rests in the fact that narrative analysis often focuses on plot at the expense of roles and characters. Building on narrative psychology and, in particular, transactional and linguistic types of analysis, we propose a typology of character roles—Persecutor, Victim, Hero, and Fool—that is useful to uncover scenarios within memes and, thus, reveal their intrinsic narrative structure. We apply this framework to the analysis of political narratives embedded within 241 coronavirus memes systematically sampled from Reddit’s r/CoronavirusMemes between January and May 2020. Five main scenarios or storylines emerged from this analysis, the first four depicting a more or less common narrative of protest against the incompetence and/or malevolence of the political class—from Donald Trump and the Republicans in the United States to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives in the United Kingdom and, finally, to politicians in Asia such as Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un—while the fifth scenario brought to the fore social categories made salient by the pandemic and focused especially on the relation between people who respect and don’t respect measures. The psychological, social, and political implications of these scenarios in relation to the pandemic are discussed, as well as the broader consequences of studying memes as narrative structures.

This study explores the linguistic indexes of power dynamics through the lens of linguistic politeness and impoliteness in Arab media discourse. This objective was achieved through examining Abu Shawkat's utterances systematically utilizing well-established politeness theories, impoliteness paradigms, plus cooperation principles. The examination delves into Abu Shawkat’s patriarchal authority and its impact on their discursiveness from the viewpoint of complex societal interplays involving power relations, social distance assessments and imposition. Characters skillfully employ varied strategies of both politeness and impoliteness techniques alongside slight offensiveness methods for effectively navigating these subtly shifting landscapes to ultimately achieve various social objectives. The study emphasizes the need for comprehending politeness theories when navigating complex dramatic dialogues. Face-threatening acts and politeness strategies determine the relative power dynamics in the conversation between dramatic characters. In addition to that, this analysis shows how impoliteness can create complex authority hierarchies whilst simultaneously claiming autonomy within a narrative structure. This study in conclusion amplifies our understanding of the linguistic interplay weaved within dramatic discourse, primarily if it is tied deeply with Arab cultural nuances.

Narratives are increasingly subject to empirical study in a wide variety of disciplines. However, in public policy, narratives are thought of almost exclusively as a poststructural concept outside the realm of empirical study. In this paper, after reviewing the major literature on narratives, we argue that policy narratives can be studied using systematic empirical approaches and introduce a “Narrative Policy Framework” (NPF) for elaboration and empirical testing. The NPF defines narrative structure and narrative content. We then discuss narrative at the micro level of analysis and examine how narratives impact individual attitudes and hence aggregate public opinion. Similarly, we examine strategies for the studying of group and elite behavior using the NPF. We conclude with seven hypotheses for researchers interested in elaborating the framework.

We examine tone dispersion, or the degree to which tone words are spread evenly within a narrative, to evaluate whether narrative structure provides insight into managers' voluntary disclosures and users' responses to those disclosures. We find that tone dispersion is associated with current aggregate and disaggregated performance and future performance, managers' financial reporting decisions, and managers' incentives and actions to manage perceptions. Furthermore, we find that tone dispersion is associated with analysts' and investors' responses to conference call narratives. Our results suggest that tone dispersion both reflects and affects the information that managers convey through their narratives.

This study examines Chinese 12-episode web series by conceptualizing Romanticized Narrative (RN) as a compensatory narrative configuration produced by platform-conditioned structural compression rather than a purely stylistic preference. While existing scholarship on web series has largely focused on platform governance, regulation and industrial transformation, less attention has been paid to how platform-driven short-season formats reorganize narrative form to generate affective engagement and ideological meaning. Drawing on Todorov’s three-level narrative model and multimodal narratology, the study conducts qualitative content analysis of two representative suspense dramas, The Long Night (2020) and The Long Season (2023), coding narrative time, mode, style and characterization. The findings indicate that under the constraints of the 12-episode, platform-optimized seasonal structure, RN coordinates intensified characterization, non-linear temporal organization and stylistic saturation to secure rapid affective attachment and moral legibility within a finite narrative arc. While this compensatory configuration enhances emotional resonance and binge-oriented engagement, it also tends to translate systemic tensions (such as institutional failure or socio-economic transformation) into individualized trajectories of sacrifice, perseverance, or revenge, thereby narrowing the space for structural critique. By linking platform-conditioned structural compression, romanticized affect and ideological closure, this study extends narratological analysis to web-native seriality and offers a transferable framework for comparative research on contemporary platform-based storytelling.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road presents a bleak and nihilistic world, yet the narrative also highlights the importance of hope and positivity amidst all the chaos. This paper investigates the relationship between the nihilistic elements of the novel and the directionally challenged world in which the protagonists navigate. This study specifically aims to uncover the role of hope in constructing the apocalypse narrative and how it counters the nothingness that permeates the story. Additionally, this paper examines McCarthy's narrative style and its contribution to the nihilistic world-building found in the novel. Drawing on earlier works by McCarthy, this study demonstrates how his writing style shapes the portrayal of a globally warmed and pollution-stricken generation, reinforcing the novel's overarching themes of despair and desolation. Finally, this paper argues that The Road is not merely a story of nihilism but a complex exploration of the human capacity for hope in the face of overwhelming adversity. By analyzing the novel's narrative structure, themes, and language, this study sheds light on how McCarthy's unique style contributes to the creation of a powerful and thought-provoking apocalyptic narrative.

El presente artículo fundamenta, desde la semántica narrativa extensional y la temática representacional, algunas de las categorías analíticas que han caracterizado las revisiones historiográficas y críticas de la obra de ficción literaria colonial El desierto prodigioso y prodigio del desierto. En primer lugar, se deslindan la fábula y el argumento dentro de la estructura narrativa del texto empírico. Se elucida una propuesta de cadena de motivemas, con su respectiva cadena de motivos, para probar la sistematicidad total del texto y las múltiples estructuras y tipos discursivos que hibrida. A continuación, se propone una reconfiguración de los niveles narrativos que componen el Campo de Referencia Interno del texto de ficción. Finalmente, se apuntan algunos de los principales retos para establecer la proyección genérica de las textualidades coloniales, dentro de la historiografía y crítica literaria.

Rewilding may signify the emergence of a new environmental narrative. Discussion of underlying policy narratives is important because they shape understandings of the state of world and how society should act. I summarise the origins of twentieth century environmental narratives and argue that their influence derives from components telling of the dire state of nature, the catastrophic consequences of this and the need for competent authorities to act to govern the perpetrators of harm. Reflecting on my engagements with rewilding science and practice, I posit that stories of rewilding are adopting a quite different narrative structure: one that involves components telling of feelings of despondency and processes of awakening, action, and reassessment leading to the recovery of natural and social well-being. These components align with the narrative structure of accounts of mental health. I label this emerging narrative ‘Recoverable Earth’ and suggest that it signifies action by grassroot conservationists to reassert their ability to lead change locally and produce better outcomes for nature and society.