Citation:
Date Published:
11 January 2024Abstract:
The term “narrative” has become ubiquitous in public discourse, but to date little work has been done to explore how vitally it is related both historically and theoretically to another contemporary buzzword: creativity. By addressing this lacuna this essay seeks not only to illuminate the popularity of narrative as a mode of knowledge, but to shed new light on its relationship to another core concept in the field: fictionality. The essay argues that the narrative turn and the contemporary boom in instrumental storytelling have been facilitated by a lexical and semantic shift from narrative as artefact to narrative as process, and that this shift is the result of ongoing historical intersections with new secularised and democratised theories of creativity as a human faculty. By tracing this shift we can better understand the contested history of fictionality, particularly in relation to debates about the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, and bring a new approach to the epistemological underpinings of the narrative turn in the academy and the subsequent popular appeal to personal storytelling in the networked public sphere.
August 2023: Paul Dawson is the author of three monographs: The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel (OSU Press, 2023), The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction (OSU Press, 2023), and Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005). He is co-editor, with Maria Mäkelä, of the Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (Routledge, 2022) and guest editor of a special issue of Poetics Today on “Narrative Theory and the History of the Novel” (2018). He is winner of the 2010 prize for Best Essay in Narrative; his essays have appeared in journals such as ELH, Style, Studies in the Novel, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. Paul is also a poet whose first book, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry award in Australia. He teaches in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales and in 2023 is President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.