Impact Factor: 0.4

Published since August 28, 2017

Frontiers of Narrative Studies

ISSN: 2509-4890

Editor-in-chief: Shang Biwu

About this journal

Frontiers of Narrative Studies was founded in 2014 and appears in two volumes per year. A peer-reviewed journal of international scope, Frontiers of Narrative Studies features articles reporting results of research in all branches of narrative studies, in-depth reviews of selected current literature in the field, and occasional guest editorials and reports. Its broad range of scholarship includes narratives across a variety of media, including literary writing, film and television, journalism, and graphic narratives. It welcomes theoretically sophisticated essays that examine narratives of all kinds from a host of critical, interdisciplinary, or cross-cultural perspectives. Particular emphasis is placed upon state-of-the-art research in the field of interdisciplinary narrative inquiries. The journal publishes original articles, interviews as well as book reviews. From time to time, Special Issues, devoted to topics of particular interest, are assembled by Guest Editors.

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Topics

Volume 9 Issue 1

July 2023

Frontmatter

Publicly Available July 22, 2023

Frontmatter

Page range: I-IV

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Open Access July 22, 2023

Literary and critical encounters with the Anthropocene: An interview with Seán Hand

Li Zou, Seán Hand

Page range: 1-13

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Abstract

Seán Hand is Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Europe) of the University of Warwick. His research mainly focuses on literature, ideas and related developments in France and other Western countries from the early twentieth century to the present day. In this wide-ranging interview, Hand points out that there is a competition of intellectual versions of the Anthropocene, such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene. With regards to the situation of the Anthropocene, he argues that literary and critical studies should move beyond masterful exposition of a work and take up the task of calling attention to our actions, renewing our connection and commitment to the life-web we inhabit, and engaging critically with technologization discussions. Hand also discusses the relationships between the “post-human turn” and the “non-human turn” and suggests that while post-human is connected with a teleological notion of development into a “beyond”, non-human is more grounded in today’s, and yesterday’s, reality. As an analyst of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, he here maintains that while Levinas’s insights on alterity could not be unproblematically applied in dealing with the “Anthropocene”, Levinasian ethics and Anthropocene concerns could produce transformative insights and effects. Lastly, Hand gives inspiring suggestions on the career development of young scholars and emphasizes the importance of doing multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and international studies.

Open Access July 22, 2023

Introduction: Narratives of ageing in the fantastic mode

Heike Hartung, Sarah Falcus

Page range: 14-19

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Open Access July 22, 2023

Age(ism) in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales

Katharina Fürholzer

Page range: 20-34

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Abstract

Across the globe, the genre of the fairy tale is inextricably linked with Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). To this day, the Danish writer and his sombre, often dystopian tales are famed for their pronounced criticism of socio-cultural norms and are read and loved by all ages. In his work, Andersen made ample use of the fantastic, which ranges from the realm of the supernatural (esp. anthropomorphic plants, animals, and things) to the realm of the (realistically) imaginary such as the faculty of imagination or (religious) beliefs. In doing so, socio-cultural phenomena such as conceptions of and reactions to (older) age are approached from a broad spectrum of angles. While research has already shown a keen interest in matters of gender, (homo)sexuality, and class in Andersen’s tales, his approach to (older) age and ageism has rather been ignored so far. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to break ground in the form of an in-depth analysis of correlations between age(ism) and the fantastic in Andersen’s literary tales “Grandmother” (1845) and “The Old House” (1847), with a particular interest in the question of how far age(ism) is constructed by both the narrator and the reader.

Open Access July 22, 2023

“Old things made new”: Transfusive rejuvenescence in M. E. Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” and H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”

James Aaron Green

Page range: 35-53

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Abstract

In 1897, congratulating Bram Stoker on the release of Dracula , the writer M. E. Braddon tries to establish precedence for herself by classifying the novel not, as we might expect, as a story of vampirism, but as one of “transfusion”. Taking this designation as its cue, this article recovers examples of what I term “transfusive rejuvenescence fiction”, in which a prolongation of life or restoration of youth is achieved via corporeal transferal. It contextualizes this sub-genre by charting how a revival of interest in blood transfusion’s rejuvenatory promise occurred alongside shifts in the attitudes to age and aging – to old age especially. Contrary to medical writers, who optimistically envisaged transfusion as an integral part of a “sentimental economy” – in which blood is donated out of “fellow-feeling” – transfusive rejuvenescence fiction raises the prospect of bloodborne youthfulness becoming commodified and circulating according to the tenets of the capitalist marketplace. In these fictions, transfusion serves as an evocative and versatile figure for expressing anxieties around the increasingly urgent question of provision for old age and the issues of intergenerational equity implied therein. To prove the argument, this article performs a comparative reading of Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” and H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”, both of 1896. The comparable but distinctive approaches taken by these two short stories means that examining them in tandem provides us with a fuller picture of the contributions that transfusive rejuvenescence fiction made to fin-de-siècle discourses of age and aging.

Open Access July 22, 2023

“Inside many of us / is a small old man” – age/ing in Anne Sexton’s Transformations: A community discussion

Andrea Zittlau

Page range: 54-68

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Abstract

The poetry book Transformations by Anne Sexton consists of seventeen poems based on the versions of fairytales by the Brothers Grimm. Told by Sexton, the tales become sharp comments on American culture, changing characters and action to focus on gender, power systems and medical histories. Analyzing the poems “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, “Rapunzel”, and “Rumpelstiltskin”, this article focusses on Sexton’s revelation of the aging and ageism inherent in both the fairytales and contemporary American culture. I am interested in a reading of the poems beyond the confessional approach so common in analyses of Sexton’s poetry, focusing instead on how the characters struggle with beauty expectations, age and gender roles as well as loneliness. Therefore, I have discussed the chosen poems with different communities beyond the academic context with an interest in other approaches and experiences applied in the readings. The voices are woven into the article, adding to the analysis and offering a comment on contemporary reading practices.

July 22, 2023

“It made her age hard to guess”: Narrating the dynamics of aging and gender through Victorian Gothic archetypes in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black

Marta Miquel-Baldellou

Page range: 69-86

Abstract

Although Susan Hill has become a prolific writer of ghost narratives in the last decades, it was at a particularly momentous stage of her life as a woman writer that she published The Woman in Black (1983), which is considered her first ghost novel. Evoking the Victorian past, The Woman in Black engages intertextually with Victorian novels within the Gothic genre. The character of the Woman in Black comprises features pertaining to different Victorian Gothic archetypes, such as the ghost, the vampire, and the double. Some of the traits pertaining to these literary archetypes echoed Victorian anxieties about aging that are recovered and reinterpreted in Hill’s novel. Furthermore, in analogy with a Gothic romance, the encounter between the narrator as a young man, Arthur Kipps, and a spectral aging woman, the Woman in Black, unleashes the hero’s process of coming of age, which he recollects in his old age as he is writing his narrative. Narratological features pertaining to the Gothic genre, like the use of a frame narrative that blends past and present, underscore the dynamics of aging, since processes of interrupted aging and premature aging disrupt the boundaries that conventionally distinguish life stages. This article approaches Hill’s The Woman in Black as a contemporary ghost novel that evokes and subverts Victorian discourses of aging and gender, at the same time that, from a contemporary perspective, it vindicates the figure of the Victorian fallen woman as an aging mother.

July 22, 2023

The wisdom of intergenerational relationships in Ursula Le Guin’s series Annals of the Western Shore (Gifts, Voices and Powers)

Maricel Oró-Piqueras, Yuliia Benderska

Page range: 87-101

Abstract

Ursula Le Guin’s novels included in Annals of the Western Shore, published between the years 2004 and 2007, have as protagonists three young characters who, among uprising, rebellion and unfair states, have to find their place in Le Guin’s the Western Shore world. The three protagonists share a gift – the gift of remembering and telling stories – which is transmitted to two of them through an older man from the community where they live. Once the main characters come together at the end of the third novel of the saga, they realise that the only way in which a free and prosperous state can be achieved is through knowledge and the sharing of the stories of both ancestors and new writers. The series, thus, problematizes the concept of wisdom associated with a binary stereotypical image of old age as either attached to loss and decrepitude or to wisdom, particularly in the fantastic mode. In this article, and following Le Guin’s belief in the intrinsic interconnectivity of all things, “organic and inorganic, material and spiritual, object and force – [that] shape and are shaped by each other” (Senior 1996: 104), we aim to explore the value of intergenerational relationships in building a fairer and more prosperous society in Le Guin’s series Annals of the Western Shore. Whereas the young characters and protagonists in each of the three novels need the guidance of older members of their communities to come to terms with their “gifts”, the coming of age of these young protagonists will also question the unfair and destructive beliefs behind the social organisation of the regimes in which they grew up and became adults.

July 22, 2023

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Little Red and Other Stories and gerotranscendence on the page

Zuzanna Zarebska

Page range: 102-120

Abstract

Little Red and Other Stories is a collection of short stories that taps into many different dimensions of older women’s existence, exploring characters who are often bereft or in search of a more meaningful expression of their identity. Divided by physical and non-physical frontiers, gerontological challenges persist as much as the desire to live in spite of internal and external changes. The stories are shaped by mortality and by the subjective and imaginary discourses of culture, with the issues of autonomy, agency, intimacy and well-being remaining at their core. Little Red and Other Stories provides us with a multidirectional perspective on the aging process. It offers stories that see characters move towards a greater experience of agency and relational freedom. The internal interrogations and external interpellations present in the narratives are reinforced by the author’s use of metatextuality, bearing in mind her expertise in folk literature and mythology. She deliberately places her characters in unusual circumstances in order to convince her reader that if crossing of the real/fantastic worlds is possible, it is also possible to cross, or challenge, age definitions. If transgressions are possible on the page, we, too, have the capacity to create our own life-narratives and be agentic in our older age, a time conventionally seen as stagnant, limited and dominated by decline. Indeed, older people, mostly women in Ní Dhuibhne, have an extraordinary capacity to translate their experience into wisdom and possess the necessary stamina to rewrite their stories.

July 22, 2023

Futurity, the life course and aging in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Katsura Sako, Sarah Falcus

Page range: 121-136

Abstract

Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) in this article, we bring the perspectives of aging and posthumanist studies together to explore how the novel helps us to rethink our being and relationality in time beyond the boundaries of the human. In particular, we are interested in the novel’s critique of the anthropocentric privileging of youth and progress in the ways in which we imagine the future. Central to this form of imagination are generational continuity and the symbolism of the child: a new generation as a promise of the future, or rather, a better human future. Nevertheless, this novel does not simply employ the trope of generational futurity; instead, it interrogates and draws attention to the exclusionary way this type of thinking functions. Through its blurring of human and AI “child”, ultimately, Klara and the Sun suggests the dangers and the limits of a generational imagination that seeks to reproduce the same, progressive narrative of the future through the image of the child not “ growing up and growing old ” (Woodward 2020: 55; italics in original). Our analysis then suggests how fictional speculative modes might both engage with and yet also force us to reflect critically upon that form of future-orientated thinking.

Open Access July 22, 2023

Rewriting rules, changing worlds: Diegetic and ludic forms of metareference in The Magic Circle

Theresa Krampe

Page range: 137-157

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Abstract

In addition to transmedial techniques such as metalepses, allegories, or obtrusive narrators, contemporary videogames also use medium-specific forms, including game rules, mechanics, or interfaces, to create metareference. Similarly, metareferential games seem not only concerned with questions of their fictionality but show particular interest in their own technological infrastructure and embeddedness in digital culture. In this article, I propose a systematic approach to analysing metareference in videogames, distinguishing between the gameworld and the game system as the two main layers of communication from which metareference emerges. In a case study of the indie metagame The Magic Circle (Question 2015), I show that the game’s distinctive metareferential style is the result of interactions between what I call diegetic and ludic forms of metareference, and which are produced at the level of the gameworld and the game system, respectively.

July 22, 2023

Unresolved conflicts and suspended ethics: Reading “The Monster” from the perspective of voice

Mengni Kang

Page range: 158-174

Abstract

This article draws on rhetorical narrative theory and makes a case for Stephen Crane’s employment of the resource voice to communicate the naturalistic theme of “The Monster”. It argues that by modulating voices on different communicative tracks, the author invites us to recognize two pairs of conflicting forces: one of free will and external forces that shows in the causes of Henry’s and Trescott’s heroic acts, and the other of individual agency and collective identity that characterizes the narrative’s engagement with Whilomville. It is my view that the author invites readers to share his naturalistic outlook and refrain from making conclusive ethical judgments on the characters and the community. For readers, attending to the synthesis of tone, style, and values in utterances helps with inferring the author’s rhetorical purposes. To this end, the article also considers Crane’s biographical information and newspaper sketches, calling for the inclusion of contextual and intertextual matters in rhetorical criticism.

Volume 9 (2023)

Issue 1

Volume 8 (2022)

Volume 7 (2021)

Volume 6 (2020)

Volume 5 (2019)

Volume 4 (2018)

Volume 3 (2017)

Journal Impact Factor	0.4	2022, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2023)
Journal Citation Indicator	2.91	2022, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2023)

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Instructions for Authors

Submissions to the journal should be written in English. Contributors whose native language is not English should have their manuscripts read by a native speaker before submission. Contributions should be sent to the editor (biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn).

An abstract of between 100 and 150 words must be submitted together with the contribution. Examples not in English must have aligned interlinear glosses and an idiomatic translation. Figures and diagrams must be reproducible originals and should be submitted on separate sheets, carefully numbered and labeled. They should be referred to in the text and the approximate position should be indicated. Notes should be kept to an absolute minimum and be as brief as possible. They may contain no diagrams or tables. They should be numbered consecutively and indicated in the text by a raised (superscript) number following any punctuation marks.

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Once accepted for publication, the author(s) will be required to submit the final version electronically conforming to journal style. Please see the De Gruyter Mouton journal style sheet for details regarding journal style. If possible, a common wordprocessing program such as WORD should be used. Any special characters used should be labeled and clearly identified at their first occurrence. The Editor reserves the right to reject any articles that do not conform to the requirements.

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Copies of any letters granting permission to reproduce illustrations or tables from other sources, or lengthy quoted passages, must be included with the manuscript.

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Authors are asked to check their manuscripts very carefully before submitting them in order to prevent delays and extra costs at the proof stage. Authors will receive PDF page proofs for correction which must be returned by dates given in the publication schedule.

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Upon publication, authors will receive electronic offprints (in PDF format) of their contribution. Guest editors of special issues will receive complimentary print copies of the issue.

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief

Shang Biwu (Shanghai JiaoTong University, China)

Co-Editors

William Baker (Northern Illinois University, USA)
Wolfgang G. Müller (Friedrich Schiller University, Germany)

Editorial Board

Péter Hajdu (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
David Herman (Durham University, UK)
Stefan Iversen (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo, Norway)
Gunther Martens (Ghent University, Belgium)
Brian McHale (Ohio State University, USA)
Ansgar Nünning (University of Giessen, Germany)
Vera Nünning (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
Ruth E. Page (University of Birmingham, UK)
James Phelan (Ohio State University, USA)
Gerald Prince (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Qiao Guoqiang (Shanghai International Studies University, China)
Brian Richardson (University of Maryland, USA)
Dan Shen (Peking University, China)
Michael Toolan (University of Birmingham, UK)
Wang Ning (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)

Editorial Assistants
Lin Yuzhen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)
Tang Yili (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)

All correspondence concerning editorial matters and manuscripts should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief (biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn).

(Deutsch)

Online ISSN: 2509-4890
Print ISSN: 2509-4882
Type: Journal
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
First published: August 28, 2017
Publication Frequency: 2 Issues per Year
Audience: Scholars of semiotics, comparative literature, world literature, linguistics, communications, media studies, literary theory
Keywords: Literature; linguistics; media; communications