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Many believe the Song to be a loose collection of love poetry that lacks unity. That the Song evidences a loose unity has already been recognised (Pope & Elliott). This thesis provides evidence that any recognised unity is much stronger than has been touted and that the Song also contains a narrative. Narratology has demonstrated that certain types of lyric poetry can have narrative like events. In order to show evidence of a story, one has to demonstrate its \"backbone\" namely the existence of events that have a causative connection between them. If there is a love story especially, one would expect it to conform to a generalised set of scenarios. Not much has been written by way of narrative apart from the perspectives of dramatists who resort to importing fanciful meaning from outside the text. My work seeks to avoid these tendencies and employs techniques from narratology to examine the structure of the Song, the causality of events in the text, and its spatio-temporal dimension in order to establish a narrative in the Song. It also seeks to address other important issues like how lyric poetry might accommodate narrative; cohesion of what appears to be very disparate elements of the Song; and the meaning of some elusive metaphors and how these might contribute to a narrative. Comments from the examination include the following: \"A very well written and highly convincing thesis that the Song can be understood as a lyrical narrative ... \" \"Demonstrated that an acknowledged, unsolved puzzle exists in scholarship about the structure of the Song, and posited an original solution ... \" \"There is some good originality in this thesis.\" \"Very convincing and well-argued. It should definitely be published in the scholarly arena.\"

In an age of computer modelling, a traditional semantics behind the term ‘simulation’ and its platonic associations with imitation or pretense has ceded ground to more versatile, if not opposite, applications of the term. This epistemic shift is evident in the way simulation has undergone conceptual and practical reconsiderations beyond ontology. This dissertation arose from this initial enquiry, and the belief that simulation’s mimetic strategies can be considered to authenticate, rather than replicate, behaviours of properties under study, with modelling being an essential representational but also poietic process suited to narrative world-building. Correlations can be drawn between simulation modelling and narratology. Models construct frames of reference for target systems through make-believe mechanisms which also validate their truth as fictions – a mechanism readily seen in narratology. Fictional worlds are more than mimetic narrative constructs; they are foremost, approaches to narrative phenomenology and simulation. The reader should feel or experience the textual world as possible, and if specific behaviour or affect is to be elicited, the narrative model requires strategies which sufficiently simulate if not the texture, then at least a mentally intelligible perception of that world. Simulation narratives thus place additional ‘writerly’ demands on the reader as producer rather than passive consumer of a text. Reading becomes a reconfigurative process (a form of mental re-writing) since the simulation of narrative requires the same imputation of laws and accreditation of behaviours between the source reality and target model present in scientific simulation. In turn, formal demands placed by narrative simulation translates into the need for functional, if highly synthetic, hypermimetic processes, where a secondary reality is augmented. This is especially suitable in cases where object phenomenology is to be prolonged for the sake of reader immundation or manipulation of the text.

Although conspiracy theories have long been a staple of American political culture, no research has systematically examined the nature of their support in the mass public. Using four nationally representative surveys, sampled between 2006 and 2011, we find that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory and that many popular conspiracy theories are differentiated along ideological and anomic dimensions. In contrast with many theoretical speculations, we do not find conspiracism to be a product of greater authoritarianism, ignorance, or political conservatism. Rather, the likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted by a willingness to believe in other unseen, intentional forces and an attraction to Manichean narratives. These findings both demonstrate the widespread allure of conspiracy theories as political explanations and offer new perspectives on the forces that shape mass opinion and American political culture.

This book review covers two recent works which explore contemporary narrative and literary media through a transmedial lens. As will be argued, The Routledge Companion to Literary Media (2023) approaches literariness as part of a media ecology rather than as being present in isolated art forms. The essay collection edited by Ensslin, Round, and Thomas deals with how literature and other (analogue as well as digital) media shape each other and how this affects readers. In doing so, the contributors consider multiple aspects and actors involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of literary media ranging from locative narratives to podcasts, as well as their diverse materialities. In a similar vein, Playing at Narratology (2019) treats narrativity as a phenomenon which resists rigid medial classification. Punday, who had previously explored the role of the novel in the present-day media landscape in Writing at the Limit (2012), revisits narrative in a broader sense as a transmedial phenomenon and revises concepts from traditional narratology with the help of digital media artefacts. The essay discusses these volumes with particular reference to literature’s embeddedness in the media system and the importance of accounting for medium-specific affordances. 

This study delves into the unexplored realm of campus fiction, examining the works of Suzette Mayr and Janice MacDonald, two Canadian university professors, through the lens of feminist narratology. Focusing on Dr. Edith Wane and the Hares of Crawley Hall and Another Margaret, this research investigates how these campus novels employ narrative strategies to construct female discourse and establish female authority. Despite the presence of female voices, the irony of silenced or unheard female narratives persists. Through a critical analysis of narrative voice, focalization, and speech, this study reveals the ways in which Mayr and Macdonald magnify female emotions and feelings through feminist consciousness. The authors’ use of heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrative structures, coupled with internal focalization, creates a dynamic where both female and male characters are afforded opportunities to observe and speak. This research contributes to the existing body of feminist narratology, shedding light on the underexamined intersection of campus fiction and trauma.

Text-to-image (T2I) models are rapidly advancing into creative practice and increasingly support generating illustrated storybooks, i.e., sequential and image-based narratives conditioned on written text. Previous surveys have examined challenges in video coherence or single-image fidelity. To our best knowledge, there is no comprehensive review that addresses the unique requirements of storybook illustration. This survey fills this gap by grounding the study of AI-illustrated storybook generation in a narratology framework. Specifically, this survey introduces a six-dimensional consistency model encompassing time, space, character, event and plot, style, and theme. For each dimension, we include consolidate definitions, representative methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics, thereby mapping the current landscape of the field. Building on this analysis, we further identify cross-dimensional failure modes and limitations of current approaches. Finally, we propose potential future research directions, including the development of book-scale integrated evaluation systems tailored for illustrated storybooks, more robust and controllable generation pipelines, enhanced multimodal semantic–visual alignment mechanisms, and the establishment of reader-oriented safety and educational guidelines.

As a rejoinder to Susan Stanford Friedman's call for a transnational turn in narrative theory, this article attempts to draw attention to a comparativist turn in current narrative studies, addressing three broad questions: why compare, what to compare, and how to compare. A comparative narratology is expected to decolonize and to subvert the hegemony of European and Anglo-American narrative theory, and thus both paves the way for the rise of those marginalized narrative theories and draws attention to those neglected and peripheral narratives. Apart from presenting a Chinese counterpart of Western narrative theory, it tries to specifically engage with newly developed unnatural narrative theory by analyzing Chinese ghost stories, a particular type of unnatural narrative in Chinese literature, so as to display its unnatural features as well as its challenges to existing Western unnatural approaches.

The rhetorical account of fictionality has drawn considerable attention in narratological circles, but the extent to which it is fundamentally at odds with other approaches, despite their diversity, has not been recognised. This essay aims to elucidate the significant departure from all previous contributions to the theory of fiction, achieved by conceiving of fictionality as a resource integral to direct communication, not the quality marking fiction's detachment from its framing communicative context. It contrasts the concept of fictionality as rhetoric with the main currents in theory of fiction and establishes a basis for scrutinising some open questions within rhetorical approaches, concerning the scope and precise definition of fictionality conceived in this way. It concludes by pointing towards three distinct areas of further research opened up by a rhetorical perspective, relating to the contextual variables of the fiction's medium, its immediate discursive environment and its cultural and historical juncture.

Because of the growing popularity of novel forms of narrative, such as flash fiction, this study aims at expanding the parameters of cognitive narratology to encompass the interpretation of these unnatural and anti-mimetic narratives which disrupt the narrative conventions relying on inventive techniques. It adopts cognitive narratology and insights form cognitive linguistics to analyze how the unconventional narrative structures of flash fiction are encoded and decoded. It mainly focuses on how writers of flash fiction use parallel and circular structures to compress idea density and weighty significance into a sparce spatiotemporal scale which is compatible to the limits of cyberspace and decreasing attention span. It interprets the cognitive construction of these innovative structures and analyzes the cognitive processes promoted by reading them.

Narratives are present in many forms of human expression and can be understood as a fundamental way of communication between people. Computational understanding of the underlying story of a narrative, however, may be a rather complex task for both linguists and computational linguistics. Such task can be approached using natural language processing techniques to automatically extract narratives from texts. In this paper, we present an in depth survey of narrative extraction from text, providing a establishing a basis/framework for the study roadmap to the study of this area as a whole as a means to consolidate a view on this line of research. We aim to fulfill the current gap by identifying important research efforts at the crossroad between linguists and computer scientists. In particular, we highlight the importance and complexity of the annotation process, as a crucial step for the training stage. Next, we detail methods and approaches regarding the identification and extraction of narrative components, their linkage and understanding of likely inherent relationships, before detailing formal narrative representation structures as an intermediate step for visualization and data exploration purposes. We then move into the narrative evaluation task aspects, and conclude this survey by highlighting important open issues under the domain of narratives extraction from texts that are yet to be explored.