'Narratology: An Introduction' provides an introduction and overview of Narratology, a rapidly growing field in the humanities. Literary narratologists have provided many key concepts and analytical tools which are widely used in the interdisciplinary analysis of such narrative features as plot, point of view, speech presentation, ideological perspective and interpretation. The introduction explains the central concepts of narratology, their historical development, and draws together contemporary trends from many different disciplines into common focus. It offers a compendium of the development of narratology from classical poetics to the present.

The rise of the novel, a genre that received a status of popularity equal to that of Elizabethan drama during the Renaissance, is one of the three, along with Neoclassicism and Pre-Romanticism, major aspects of the eighteenth-century British literature. The typology of the eighteenth century novel is remarkable: picaresque novel, adventure novel, epistolary novel, sentimental novel, novel of manners, moral novel, comic novel, the anti-novel, and others. Like in the seventeenth century, the picaresque narrative remains popular and influential, and in English literature, in particular – along with moral and didactic purpose, neoclassical influence, and other thematically textualized aspects – it contributed to the rise of the novel as a distinct literary genre, a phenomenon that occurred in England much later than on the Continent. Or rather, the comic (including satirical) attitude, social concern, and moral didacticism – emerging from both picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – and together with picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – are responsible for the emergence of verisimilitude as the forming element responsible in turn for the rise of the literary system of the novel in the eighteenth century English literature. Among them, the present article attempts to emphasize the contribution to the occurring of this cultural and literary phenomenon by the neoclassical principles and the moral concern reflected in the novels. Keywords: the rise of the English novel; verisimilitude; neoclassicism; ethical didacticism; picaresque.

This essay draws on cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to illuminate what may be the most important issue in genre theory at present: genre mixture and hybridization. Genres have been very productively treated as cognitive schemas, but so far such treatments have not adequately accounted for critics' descriptions of their encounters with complex works, because they have lacked a model of how schemas are modified, rearranged, and combined. In the past decade, however, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have worked out just such a model in considerable detail. Conceptual Blending Theory has roots in linguistics, psychology, literary hermeneutics, and brain science. Fauconnier and Turner and others have used Blending Theory to analyze a wide range of thought and meaning, both m undane and highly creative, in the arts, sciences, and everyday life. Taking the example of Joyce's Ulysses, and focusing on the "Circe" episode, I discuss various kinds of genre mixture, showing how surface details as well as structural aspects of the text can be explained in terms of the processes and principles of conceptual blending.

This set of course notes surveys the evolution of postmodernist fiction as of the late 1970s and also examines the status of sf within postmodern culture. The authors analyzed in detail are Toni Morrison, Ursula Le Guin, and William Gibson.