Making Time

ESSE Book Award for Junior Scholars for a book in the field of Literatures in the English Language

Responding to the current surge in present-tense novels, Making Time is an innovative contribution to narratological research on present-tense usage in narrative fiction. Breaking with the tradition of conceptualizing the present tense purely as a deictic category denoting synchronicity between a narrative event and its presentation, the study redefines present-tense narration as a fully-fledged narrative strategy whose functional potential far exceeds temporal relations between story and discourse. The first part of the volume presents numerous analytical categories that systematically describe the formal, structural, functional, and syntactic dimensions of present-tense usage in narrative fiction. These categories are then deployed to investigate the uses and functions of present-tense narration in selected twenty-first century novels, including Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan's Nutshell, and Irvine Welsh's Skagboys. The seven case studies serve to illustrate the ubiquity of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction, ranging from the historical novel to the thriller, and to investigate the various ways in which the present tense contributes to narrative worldmaking.

Die Reihe Narratologia publiziert innovative Monographien und Sammelbande zur modernen Erzahltheorie und zu ihrer fachgeschichtlichen Rekonstruktion aus allen philologischen Disziplinen. Sie stellt das erste narratologische Forum dieser Art in Deutschland dar. Neben literarischen Texten stehen u. a. auch das Alltagserzahlen, Wort-Bild-Texte, Erzahlen im Film und in den neuen Medien sowie das Erzahlen in Historiographie, Ethnologie, Medizin und Rechtswissenschaft im Fokus der Reihe.

Die Publikationssprachen der Reihe sind Deutsch und Englisch. Alle Bande werden zweifach begutachtet.