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Positional Faithfulness: An Optimality Theoretic Treatment of Phonological Asymmetries (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics)
by Jill N. BeckmanFirst Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space
by Eve Walsh StoddardStoddard uses the Anglophone Caribbean and Ireland to examine the complex inflections of women and race as articulated in-between the colonial discursive and material formations of the eighteenth century and those of the (post)colonial twentieth century, as structured by the defined spaces of the colonizers' estates.
Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after One Hundred Years (Children's Literature Association Series)
by Jennifer HarrisonContributions by Megan De Roover, Jennifer Harrison, Sarah Jackson, Zoe Jaques, Nada Kujundžić, Ivana Milković, Niall Nance-Carroll, Perry Nodelman, David Rudd, Jonathan Chun Ngai Tsang, Nicholas Tucker, Donna Varga, and Tim WadhamOne hundred years ago, disparate events culminated in one of the most momentous happenings in the history of children’s literature. Christopher Robin Milne was born to A. A. and Dorothy “Daphne” Milne; Edward Bear, a lovable stuffed toy, arrived on the market; and a living, young bear named Winnie settled in at the London Zoo. The collaboration originally begun by the Milnes, E. H. and Florence Shepard, Winnie herself, and the many toys and personalities who fed into the Pooh legend continued to evolve throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to become a global phenomenon. Yet even a brief examination of this sensation reveals that Pooh and his adventures were from the onset marked by a rich complexity behind a seeming simplicity and innocence. This volume, after a decades-long lull in concentrated Pooh scholarship, seeks to highlight the plurality of perspectives, modes, and interpretations these tales afford, especially after the Disney Corporation scooped its paws into the honeypot in the 1950s. Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after One Hundred Years argues the doings of Pooh remain relevant for readers in a posthuman, information-centric, media-saturated, globalized age. Pooh's forays destabilize social certainties on all levels—linguistic, ontological, legal, narrative, political, and so on. Through essays that focus on geography, language, narrative, characterization, history, politics, economics, and a host of other social and cultural phenomena, contributors to this volume explore how the stories open up discourses about identity, ethics, social relations, and notions of belonging. This first volume to offer multiple perspectives from multiple authors on the Winnie-the-Pooh books in a single collection focuses on and develops approaches that bring this classic of children’s literature into the current era. Essays included not only are of relevance to scholars with an interest in Pooh, Milne, and the “golden age” of children’s literature, but also showcase the development of children’s literature scholarship in step with exciting modern developments in literary theory.
Positioning Theory in Applied Linguistics: Research Design and Applications
by Hayriye Kayı-AydarThis book is about Positioning Theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) and its potential applications in bilingual and multilingual contexts involving teachers, learners, speakers, and users of a second/foreign or additional language. By using Positioning Theory as a theoretical lens and analytical approach, the author illustrates how various social and poststructural concepts in applied linguistics and language teacher education, including identity, agency, language socialization, classroom participation, and intercultural communication, can be investigated and better understood. The book adds a new perspective to the growing body of multidisciplinary literature in the areas of L2 teacher education and classroom learning, and includes step-by-step guidelines for positioning analysis, insights and implications for classroom practice, as well as suggested directions for future research. It will be of particular interest to language teachers and teacher educators, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics more broadly.
The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning
by Kyle Mattes David P. RedlawskTurn on the television or sign in to social media during election season and chances are you’ll see plenty of negative campaigning. For decades, conventional wisdom has held that Americans hate negativity in political advertising, and some have even argued that its pervasiveness in recent seasons has helped to drive down voter turnout. Arguing against this commonly held view, Kyle Mattes and David P. Redlawsk show not only that some negativity is accepted by voters as part of the political process, but that negative advertising is necessary to convey valuable information that would not otherwise be revealed. The most comprehensive treatment of negative campaigning to date, The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning uses models, surveys, and experiments to show that much of the seeming dislike of negative campaigning can be explained by the way survey questions have been worded. By failing to distinguish between baseless and credible attacks, surveys fail to capture differences in voters’ receptivity. Voters’ responses, the authors argue, vary greatly and can be better explained by the content and believability of the ads than by whether the ads are negative. Mattes and Redlawsk continue on to establish how voters make use of negative information and why it is necessary. Many voters are politically naïve and unlikely to make inferences about candidates’ positions or traits, so the ability of candidates to go on the attack and focus explicitly on information that would not otherwise be available is crucial to voter education.
Positive Language Education: Teaching Global Life Skills in the Language Classroom (Research and Resources in Language Teaching)
by Antonia Clare Tammy Gregersen Sarah MercerThis innovative book integrates theory and practice in the teaching of contemporary life skills alongside and as part of language teaching that looks at the 'whole student'.Introducing their Positive Language Education framework, the authors expertly outline the theoretical background for integrating linguistic objectives with a wide range of holistic 21st century competencies including emotional regulation, well-being, ecoliteracy, and global citizenship. They then offer a unique, practical array of concrete suggestions and hands-on, research-based activities to help language educators develop their repertoire as Positive Language Educators, including how to conduct their own research on this subject. This reader-friendly resource gives pre- and in-service FL/L2 teachers the tools and confidence to understand and implement these principles in the classroom and beyond.Advanced students and researchers of applied linguistics, education, and psychology, as well as curriculum developers, teacher trainers, and aspiring teachers around the world – and their students – will benefit from this unique book.
Positive Parenting with a Plan: The Game Plan for Parenting Has Been Written!
by Matthew JohnsonThe Game Plan For Parenting Has Been Written!Although there are many books with good ideas for parents, as a Mom or Dad, how do you take those good ideas and actually implement them? Positive Parenting with a Plan is the fastest growing parenting program in the U.S.A. and Canada.
Positive Psychology in Second and Foreign Language Education (Second Language Learning and Teaching)
by Katarzyna Budzińska Olga MajchrzakThis book demonstrates how resources taken from positive psychology can benefit both teachers and learners. Positive psychology is the empirical study of how people thrive and flourish. This book explores a range of topics, such as affectivity and positive emotions, engagement, enjoyment, empathy, positive institutions, a positive L2 self-system, as well as newly added Positive Language Education. Some papers in this collection introduce new topics such as the role of positive psychology in international higher education, a framework for understanding language teacher well-being from an ecological perspective, or positive institutional policies in language education contexts.
Positive Psychology in SLA
by Tammy Gregersen Peter D. MacintyrePositive psychology is the scientific study of how human beings prosper and thrive. This is the first book in SLA dedicated to theories in positive psychology and their implications for language teaching, learning and communication. Chapters examine the characteristics of individuals, contexts and relationships that facilitate learning: positive emotional states such as love, enjoyment and flow, and character traits such as empathy, hardiness and perseverance. The contributors present several innovative teaching ideas to bring out these characteristics among learners. The collection thus blends new teaching techniques with cutting-edge theory and empirical research undertaken using qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods approaches. It will be of interest to SLA researchers, graduate students, trainee and experienced teachers who wish to learn more about language learning psychology, individual differences, learner characteristics and new classroom practices.
Positive Psychology Perspectives on Foreign Language Learning and Teaching
by Danuta Gabryś-Barker Dagmara GałajdaThis book introduces readers to the principles of a fairlynew branch of psychology - positive psychology - and demonstrates how they canbe applied in the context of second language acquisition in a naturalenvironment and in instructed foreign language (FL) learning. It focuses bothon the well-being and success of the learner and the professional and personalwell-being of the teacher. Further, the book stresses the importance of thepositive emotions and character strengths of those involved in the process oflanguage learning and teaching, as well as the significant role played byenabling institutions such as school and, at the micro-level, individual FLclasses.
Positive Social Acts: A Metapragmatic Exploration of the Brighter and Darker Sides of Sociability (Elements in Pragmatics)
by Roni DanzigerSociability is friendly behavior that is performed by a variety of positive social acts that are aimed to establish, promote, or restore relationships. However, attempts to achieve these interactional goals can fail or backfire; moreover, interactants may abuse these strategies. A pragmatic focus on positive social acts illuminates the ways they succeed in promoting sociability and why they sometimes fail to enhance social relations. This Element analyzes positive social actions receiving positive and negative meta-pragmatic labels, such as firgun and flattery, in the Hebrew speaking community in Israel. Adopting a meta-pragmatic methodology enables a differentiation between positive communication and its evaluation as (in)appropriate in context. The conclusion discusses the fuzzy line between acceptable and unacceptable positive behavior and the benefits and perils of deploying positive social acts in interaction. It also suggests a conceptualization of the darker and brighter sides of sociability as intrinsically connected, rather than polar ends.
The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Attributes (Writers Helping Writers)
by Angela Ackerman; Becca PuglisiIt's a writer's job to create compelling characters who can withstand life's fallout without giving up. But building authentic, memorable heroes is no easy task. To forge realistic characters, we must hobble them with flaws that set them back while giving them positive attributes to help them achieve their goals. So how do writers choose the right blend of strengths for their characters--attributes that will render them admirable and worth rooting for--without making it too easy for them to succeed? Character creation can be hard, but it's about to get a lot easier.
Positive Word Power: The Language Of Friendship And Happiness: For Teens: The Torah Wisdom On Human Interaction Arranged For Daily Study
by Chana Nestlebaum Shaindy AppelbaumFriends, classmates, parents, siblings... they're what we cherish most in life. Now you can learn how to protect your greatest treasure from damage, keeping your relationships shining bright. It's all in the power of the words you speak. Learn the answers to such vital everyday questions as: Is a joke always funny? Is criticism always constructive? Does praise always build others up? How can I deal kindly with someone who annoys me? What if someone is not my type? How should I express anger? In 2009, The Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation produced Positive Word Power, based on "The Power of Words" by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin, which shone a bright light on the issue of ona'as devarim — hurting others with words. This daily learning sefer has been taken up by thousands of Jewish men and women who have learned how to recognize and change those thoughts and character traits that spur nice people to say hurtful things. Now The Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation brings these priceless lessons to you, teenage readers, through practical scenarios, strategies and discussion questions that reflect the unique challenges of your life. Positive Word Power for Teens will sensitize you to the impact of words you use and hear every day and help you shed negative habits. Through our words, each of us has the power to paint for ourselves a bright and loving world, or a dark and lonely one. With an investment of just a few minutes a day, you can learn how to choose the beautiful hues of kindness and sensitivity, and paint a world you'll be happy to live in today and for the rest of your life!
The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books And The People Who Read Them
by Elif BatumanOne of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED--ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!--TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces--for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books-- have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own.
Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding
by Rebecca R. FalkoffIn Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity.Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other Open Access repositories.
Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism
by Harold BloomIn arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood.Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens--and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things."As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."
Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Sarah A. WillburnIn her absorbing study of nineteenth-century mystical writings, Sarah Willburn formulates a new conception of individualism that offers a fresh look at Victorian subjectivity. Drawing upon extensive archival work in the British Library, Willburn analyzes séance accounts, novels about mediumship, and metaphysical treatises to make important connections between contemporary writings on mysticism and fictional works. Willburn presents the theories of compelling characters such as Newton Crosland and Lois Waisbrooker and provides exciting new readings of well-known texts by Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Martineau, and Corelli. An understanding of the Victorian fascination with mysticism, Willburn argues, leads to a better appreciation of cultural constructions of the citizen in England and of the public sphere. She introduces two key concepts against the backdrop of popular mysticism: "possessed individualism," a model for Victorian individualism based on spiritual possession, and "extra spheres," which complicate the traditional binary opposition of public and private. Together, these formulations urge us to rethink our views of Victorian political economy and gender as they pertain to mystical and religious practices.
Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature (Southern Literary Studies)
by Lisa HinrichsenEmploying recent theories of memory from multiple areas of study, Possessing the Past illuminates the tangled relationships among trauma, fantasy, and the public sphere, and their impact on the "South" in imagination and in reality. Focusing on the roles that narrative and fantasy play in creating a sense of regional distinctiveness, Lisa Hinrichsen brings a wealth of critical scholarship to her consideration of memory and southern literature. Hinrichsen's nuanced readings of a diverse group of southern authors, including William Faulkner, Roberto Fernández, Erna Brodber, Monique Truong, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, offer new ways of conceptualizing memory, place, and history. She unravels southern literature's critical confrontation with the region's history through complex systems of remembrance and erasure, and she traces how fantasy mediates trauma and adjudicates identity. Expansive in its psychoanalytical approach, her work explores issues of law, testimony, and social justice; the role of nostalgic fantasies of gentility at midcentury; the relationship between white empathy and social fantasy; the resemblance of regional patterns of disavowal to national ideologies of forgetting in Vietnam-era fiction; and the impact of contemporary multicultural literature on memory and community. Possessing the Past broadens the theoretical framework used to conceptualize memory and trauma, while grounding traumatic testimony in the specifics of time and place amply offered by southern literature. It provides new readings of an array of southern writers and deepens our understanding of the continuing importance of history, memory, and fantasy in the literature of the U.S. South.
Possibility: Essays Against Despair
by Patricia Vigderman"Reading Patricia Vigderman is like attending an ideal dinner party, where everyone has read your favorite books. Her essays wind particular passages of Proust, or George Eliot, or W.G. Sebald around personal moments; David Foster Wallace's story 'The Depressed Person' is threaded throughout an essay about her own relationship with a loved one's serious depression. Vigderman's responses are fresh and original and her sounding of our collective literary treasures are likely to send you back to read them again, now overlaid with her embroidery."-Mona SimpsonIn this accessible collection of essays, Patricia Vigderman attempts to translate some of life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. She encounters manatees, children, and snakes; with Henry Adams, Marcel Proust, and W.G. Sebald; with Texas landscape, Vertigo, and Johannes Vermeer. Adams, in Japan after his wife's death, found in the elaborate ritual of the tea ceremony and in the discomforts of a rural inn, occasions for the wit to face down grief. His letters to friends coax laughter from strangeness and loss. Like Adams, Vigderman has a stylist's passion for revelatory detail, and for the pleasure of immersion in a world. Smart, generous, and probing, her discoveries play with direct experience, exploring the interaction of life and art as "magic you can walk in and out of."Patricia Vigderman's work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Raritan, and others. She was a Literature Fellow at the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Italy and teaches at Kenyon College.
The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin
by Jean-Luc Nancy Pierre-Philippe JandinIn this series of interviews, Jean-Luc Nancy reviews his life’s work. But like Schlegel’s historian—“a prophet facing backwards”—Nancy takes this opportunity to rummage through the history of art, philosophy, religion, and politics in search of new possibilities that remain to be thought.This journey through Nancy’s thought is interspersed with accounts of places and events and deeply personal details. The result is at once unpretentious and encyclopedic: Concepts are described with remarkable nuance and specificity, but in a language that comes close to that of everyday life.As Nancy surveys his work, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts. In the end, this is a book about the possibility of a world—a world that must be greeted because it is, as Nancy says, already here.
The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form
by Peter BoxallThe Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as 'The Idea of Beauty', the nature of 'Mere Being', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself – those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.
Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science
by Debapriya SarkarThe Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature—what early moderns termed poesie—in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor.Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes “possible knowledge” as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the “possible,” defined by Philip Sidney as what “may be and should be,” to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing—including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia—in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from “nature” or reality.Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the “possible” lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.
Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy
by Alison Knowles FrazierPossible Lives uses the saints'lives written by humanists of the Italian Renaissance to explore the intertwining of classical and religious cultures on the eve of the European Reformation. The lives of saints were among the most reproduced and widely distributed literatures of medieval and early modern Europe. During the century before the Reformation, these narratives of impossible goodness fell into the hands of classicizing intellectuals known as humanists. This study examines how the humanist authors received, criticized, and rewrote the traditional stories of exemplary virtue for patrons and audiences who were surprisingly open to their textual experiments. Drawn from a newly constructed catalog of primary sources in manuscript and print, the cases in this book range from the lure of martyrdom as the West confronted Islam to the use of saints'lives in local politics and the rhetorician's classroom. Frazier discusses the writers'perceptions of historical sanctity, the commanding place of the mendicant friars, and one unique account of a contemporary holy woman.Possible Lives shows that the classical Renaissance was also a saintly Renaissance, as humanists deployed their rhetorical and philological skills to "renew the persuasive force of Christian virtue" and "save the cult of the saints." Combining quantitative and anecdotal approaches in a highly readable series of case studies, Frazier reveals the contextual richness of this little-known and unexpectedly large body of Latin hagiography.
Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage
by Lubomír DoleželWith Possible Worlds of Fiction and History, Lubomír Doležel reexamines the claim—made first by Roland Barthes and then popularized by Hayden White—that "there is no fundamental distinction between fiction and history." Doležel rejects this assertion and demonstrates how literary and discourse theory can help the historian to restate the difference between fiction and history. He challenges scholars to reassess the postmodern viewpoint by reintroducing the idea of possible worlds. Possible-worlds semantics reveals that possible worlds of fiction and possible worlds of history differ in their origins, cultural functions, and structural and semantic features. Doležel’s book is the first systematic application of this idea to the theory and philosophy of history.Possible Worlds of Fiction and History is the crowning work of one of literary theory’s most engaged thinkers.
Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology (Frontiers of Narrative)
by Alice Bell Marie-Laure RyanThe notion of possible worlds has played a decisive role in postclassical narratology by awakening interest in the nature of fictionality and in emphasizing the notion of world as a source of aesthetic experience in narrative texts. As a theory concerned with the opposition between the actual world that we belong to and possible worlds created by the imagination, possible worlds theory has made significant contributions to narratology.Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology updates the field of possible worlds theory and postclassical narratology by developing this theoretical framework further and applying it to a range of contemporary literary narratives. This volume systematically outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the possible worlds approach, provides updated methods for analyzing fictional narrative, and profiles those methods via the analysis of a range of different texts, including contemporary fiction, digital fiction, video games, graphic novels, historical narratives, and dramatic texts. Through the variety of its contributions, including those by three originators of the subject area—Lubomír Doležel, Thomas Pavel, and Marie-Laure Ryan—Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology demonstrates the vitality and versatility of one of the most vibrant strands of contemporary narrative theory.