Civic Storytelling The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature (Hardcover)

Hardcover. A deep history of storytelling as a civic agency, recalibrating literatures political role for the twenty-first centuryWhy did short narrative forms like the novella, fable, and fairy tale suddenly emerge around 1800 as genres symptomatic of literatures role in life and society? In order to explain their rapid ascent to such importance, Florian Fuchs identifies an essential role of literature, a role traditionally performed within classical civic discourse of storytelling, by looking at new or updated forms of this civic practice in modernity. Fuchs's focus in this groundbreaking book is on the fate of topical speech, on what is exchanged between participants in argument or conversation as opposed to rhetorical speech, which emanates from and ensures political authority. He shows how after the decline of the Ars topica in the eighteenth century, various forms of literary speech took up the role of topical speech that Aristotle had originally identified. Thus, his book outlines a genealogy of various literary short formsfrom fable, fairy tale, and novella to twenty-first century video storytellingthat attempted on both "high" and "low" levels of culture to exercise again the social function of topical speech. Some of the specific texts analyzed include the novellas of Theodor Storm and the novella-like lettre de cachet, proverbial fictions of Gustave Flaubert and Gottfried Keller, the fairy tale as rediscovered by Vladimir Propp and Walter Benjamin, the epiphanies of James Joyce, and the video narratives of Hito Steyerl. "This book recalibrates literature's political role for the twenty-first century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency"-- Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…