Within the last two decades, the specialized term “chara” has gained recognition for denoting fictional beings that seem typical for Japanese popular media. Usually, a distinction is made that charas – distinguished from “characters” – are somehow independent of the narrative. Since the term emerged in a variety of different discourses, however, it serves many contradictory functions. This chapter maps different ways to conceptualize the protagonists of Japanese popular culture as charas with regard to the popular franchise Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba). It introduces four relevant oppositions: “consequentiality versus cartoonishness,” “representational realism versus ludic realism,” “narrative consumption versus database consumption,” and “authorized works versus secondary productions.” What connects all these vastly different meanings of charas and the respective “other sides of narrative” is a shared interest in characters not as parts of closed, fictional stories or worlds but as nodal points of historically changing media practices and conventionalized modes of imagination and participation.

This chapter discusses a Norwegian criminal case (2010–12), which concerned the exploitation of a malfunctioning trading robot by two day-traders, in light of underlying narratives about the human–robot relationship. The central argument is that legal decision-making in this case is animated by two different underlying narratives about robots: In the first, the robot is seen as a real agent operating in the market. In the second, it is viewed as a mere tool in the hands of human agents. The outcome of the case depends to a large degree on which of these narratives the court chooses as the basis of its deliberation.

To access refugee protection in Australia and Canada, refugee applicants must speak. They must present their oral testimony in person, repeatedly and at length, unmediated by a legal representative or advocate, and in many cases without the benefit of documents, witnesses or other forms of evidence to verify their claims. This book is about the oral evidence that refugees are compelled to give, the stories they are required to narrate, and the genres of storytelling they are required to master during administrative oral hearings for the assessment of refugee status in Australia and Canada. This introductory chapter establishes the book’s central concerns, namely: what the presentation, interrogation and assessment of testimony during the oral hearing tell us about the refugee subject whom Refugee Convention-signatory states judge as authentic, credible and, ultimately, acceptable. It then carefully connects the demand for narrative within RSD with the intractable problems of credibility assessment. Finally, it interrogates the role of law, lawyers and interpreters in shaping the refugee testimony and analysis presented throughout the book.

The Conclusion returns to the book’s central questions and arguments. It considers the implications of the book’s findings for the conduct of oral hearings within RSD, and the impossibility of a just assessment of refugee applicants’ oral testimony against the current credibility criteria. While the aim of the book was not to advance precise reforms to RSD, in reflecting on what suggestions for reform arise, the Conclusion argues that if oral hearing must be a narrative occasion, it should be a more predictable one. Where applicants’ evidence is expected to fit within cognisable narrative forms, the hearing should provide the opportunity to meet these standards. However, such a reform would do nothing to address the narrative mandate traced and critiqued throughout the book. Finally, the Conclusion explores and holds open the possibility for certain texts and genres to present radical ways of imagining refugee narratives outside the strictures of refugee law, RSD and the extreme demands (and limits) currently placed on the testimony of refugee applicants.

For nineteenth-century British novels, illness did not exist just within the individual body; illness occurred at the level of communities. Responding to and building upon contemporary medicine’s focus on the social contexts of disease, novels of this era enlarge their plot structures to include more characters, more relationships, and more scopes of action than existed in novels before this century. In nineteenth-century novels, the collective experience of illness can be as intimate as the bonds between a sufferer and a caregiver or as diffuse as a global pandemic. In any case, illness revealed one’s embeddedness in larger structures of meaning. The formal characteristics of Victorian novels offer ways for critical medical humanities today to envision the social ties involved in the illness experience.

While some Classicists have made cases for the birth of fiction, linking it to various authors and texts, others have argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that neither did it ever play an important role. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

After acknowledging the important contribution of structuralist narratology to the study of ancient literature in the past decades, the first chapter highlights its price: forged mostly in the reading of modern novels, narratological taxonomies have occluded peculiarities of ancient narrative and its understanding of narrative. I discuss various alternative approaches to ancient narrative and then introduce the one chosen in this book: I take key concepts of modern narrative theory and explore how ancient texts relate to it. Instead of striving to prove the existence or prefiguration of these concepts in antiquity and thereby to prove ancient literature as modern avant la lettre, I will zero in on the fault lines, where the ancient sense of narrative does not map onto our categories.

The #MeToo movement exploded in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct while being a director and executive for TWC. Over 100 women have reported abuse or harassment by Weinstein in the course of his employment. Employment Agreements are given great leniency to draft around default rules in many states. As Professor Alexandra Andov describes in her commentary, the terms of Weinstein’s various employment agreements incentivized or sheltered behavior and crimes that harm women. Limited oversight and reporting, expansive indemnification provisions, underinclusive codes of conduct, and overly protective terms of termination contributed to Weinstein’s reign of terror on women around him. Professor Susan Chesler provides a modified employment contract that features narrative theory and “tone from the top” to increase accountability for employees and protection for victims. Drafting employment contracts to achieve these goals is achieved by mandated reporting of all incidents, eliminating indemnification to the wrongdoer for sexual wrongdoing, requiring compliance with investigations, and subjecting termination to cause employees to terminate without the ability to cure instances of sexual misconduct. Chesler’s contract is a starting point for transforming relationships across an entire organization, provide voice for stakeholders, and foster a culture that respects women’s dignity.

In “Narrating Nature,” Erin James considers how modern literature and theory grapple with the broader timescales, planetary conceptions of space, and inhuman perspectives that representations of climate change demand. Focusing on the “unnatural nature” of climate change, James undertakes a narratological analysis two recent “cli-fi” novels, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Maintaining a pedagogical emphasis, the chapter foregrounds strategies teachers can use to help students understand and write about climate change. The chapter ultimately considers how narrative can both perpetuate and subvert dominant ideologies about nature and how changing nature is changing the texture of modern narratives.

Can novels change the world, or must they merely inscribe, and thereby fortify, its injustices? Throughout a range of critical approaches, including new aesthetics, sexuality studies, book history, affect theory, environmental humanities, critical slavery studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, network theory, the spatial turn, world-systems, gender studies, network theory, health humanities, and more, tensions run high in early Americanist literary scholarship between a realist conviction that worlds create books and an equally resolute commitment to the possibility that books – especially fictions – create worlds. This chapter hopes to honor, rather than quiet, this critical ferment. To explain without explaining away will be its challenge. To create a place for those early American authors, meanwhile, who have not until recently been recognized in literary studies because their textual creations do not meet normative standards for book-length imaginative prose will be its sustaining goal.

Arden of Faversham contains an unusual number of characters, both main and minor, who tell stories. The main storyteller, Franklin, is the play’s only fictitious character – one who has affinities with another story–teller of the same name in a collection of tales, Chaucer’s Franklin. This essay argues that the authors of Arden use the story-telling characters to explore the function of narrative within drama.

In this chapter I take up two texts from the 1880s to demonstrate how evolutionary theory mandated formal experimentation in fiction. In both Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884 but not published until 1903), that experimentation appears most clearly in idiosyncratic narrative point of view: Schreiner narrates a section of her novel in first-person plural, while the whole of Butler’s novel is narrated in what I call first-person omniscient point of view. Arguing for a return to and reinvigoration of the study of relations between evolution and literary form inaugurated by Gillian Beer and George Levine in the 1980s, I also broaden the scope of that study beyond Darwin. Not Darwinism but Herbert Spencer’s universalist progressivism stands behind Schreiner’s first-person plural point of view, while Butler’s narration takes shape in connection with his own peculiar brand of Lamarckism. Finally, each of these novels of the 1880s elaborates a theory of historicity derived from the same evolutionary thinking to which anomalies in point of view can be traced, a theory that requires us to interrogate the view of history encoded in the phrase ‘of the 1880s.’