Wolf/Schmid Book order

The book explores Figurally Colored Narration (FCN), a narrative technique where the narrator's voice incorporates elements from a character's text without explicit indication. It distinguishes itself from free indirect discourse by focusing on typical aspects of a character's expression rather than their immediate thoughts. FCN operates through two primary modes: the blending of narrator and character texts and an ironic reproduction of the character's voice, allowing for critical commentary on both the content and style of the character's expression.

Telling a story requires selecting and assembling individual elements of the events one wishes to communicate. The „nonnarrated“ are the events (or parts of events) that were deliberately left out of the selection, meaning all that was not chosen to be told in the story, or chosen not to be told. Since the realm of the nonnarrated in any given story is infinitely large, studying the nonnarrated requires focusing on that which is not told but nevertheless belongs to a story. This monograph explores the phenomenon of the nonnarrated in narrative short forms from Cechov to Murakami and in novels by Dostoevskij and Robbe-Grillet.

This book is a standard work for modern narrative theory. It provides a terminological and theoretical system of reference for future research. The author explains and discusses in detail problems of communication structure and entities of a narrative work, point of view, the relationship between narrator’s text and character’s text, narrativity and eventfulness, and narrative transformations of happenings. The book outlines a theory of narration and analyses central narratological categories such as fiction, mimesis, author, reader, narrator etc. A detailed bibliography and glossary of narratological terms make this book a compendium of narrative theory which is of relevance for scholars and students of all literary disciplines.