Narrative beginnings : theories and practices
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Narrative beginnings : theories and practices
（Frontiers of narrative）
University of Nebraska Press, c2008
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-265) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
George Eliot wrote that "man cannot do without the make-believe of a beginning." Beginnings, it turns out, can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The international and interdisciplinary scope of these essays, representing every major theoretical perspective-including feminist, cognitive, postcolonial, postmodern, rhetorical, ethnic, narratological, and hypertext studies-extends from classic literary fiction to nonfictional discourse to popular culture. The authors, respected scholars and emerging critics, ask what conventions structure our understanding of beginnings before we encounter them; how best to analyze and comprehend beginnings in historical, traditional, and postmodern works; and how endings are (often unexpectedly) related to beginnings. The contributors use historical, political, narratological, and psychological frameworks to pursue these and related questions in works by Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Manuel Puig, Salman Rushdie, Julia Alvarez, and feminist hypertext fiction. Together their essays comprise the single most important volume for theorizing about and understanding narrative beginnings.
Table of Contents
Editor's Preface 000
Acknowledgments 000
Introduction: Narrative Beginnings 000
Brian Richardson
Part 1. Origins, Paratexts, and Prototypes 000
1. To Begin with the Beginning: Birth, Origin, and Narrative Inception 000
Niels Buch Leander
2. Before the Beginning: Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the Preface 000
Marilyn Edelstein
3. Stories, Wars, and Emotions: The Absoluteness of Narrative Beginnings 000
Patrick Colm Hogan
4. September 1939: Beginnings, Historical Narrative, and the Outbreak of World War II 000
Philippe Carrard
Part 2. Beginnings in Narrative Literature 000
5. "The More I Write, the More I Shall Have to Write": The Many Beginnings of Tristram Shandy 000
Tita Chico
6. Virginia Woolf and Beginning's Ragged Edge 000
Melba Cuddy-Keane
7. A Theory of Narrative Beginnings and the Beginnings of "The Dead" and Molloy 000
Brian Richardson
8. Heartbreak Tango: Manual Puig's Counter-Archive 000
Carlos Riobo
9. Lost Beginnings in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
Gaura Shankar Narayan 000
10. Recessive Origins in Julia Alvarez's Garcia Girls: A Feminist Exploration of Narrative Beginnings 000
Catherine Romagnolo
11. Curtain Up? Disrupted, Disguised, and Delayed Beginnings in Theater and Drama 000
Ryan Claycomb
12. Where to Begin? Multiple Narrative Paths in Web Fiction 000
Jessica Laccetti
Part 3. Beginnings and/as Endings 000
13. The Beginning of Beloved: A Rhetorical Approach 000
James Phelan
14. Connecting Links: Beginnings and Endings 000
Armine Kotin Mortimer
15. "Mr. Betwixt-and-Between": The Politics of Narrative Indeterminacy in Stevenson's Kidnapped and David Balfour 000
Oliver Buckton
16. Maculate Reconceptions 000
Susan Winnett
Further Reading on Narrative Beginnings 000
Contributors 000
Index 000
by "Nielsen BookData"
