Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality : A Rhetorical Approach to Storytelling in Contemporary Western Culture

The book provides frameworks for analyzing the rhetorical uses and potential dangers of narratives and fictionality. The chapters deal with various storytelling environments, such as social media, news media, literary fiction and non-fiction. The book offers new perspectives of the rhetorical and ethical problematics of narratives and fictionality.

Samuli Björninen is a researcher in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland, and a postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark. His postdoctoral research focuses on developing story-critical methods for interdisciplinary narrative studies and theorising the rhetorical use of factuality in narratives.

Pernille Meyer is a PhD student in Scandinavian Language and Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her PhD project concerns second-person narratives in Danish literature and draws on theoretical areas such as rhetorical fictionality theory and diachronic narratology.

Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on the story economy; the neoliberal logic of narrative and fiction; narrative exemplarity; consciousness, voice and realism across media; adultery in fiction; authorial ethos; and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.

Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen is Professor of Fictionality Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research has attempted to contribute to conversations about three areas of narrative theory: first-person narration, unnatural narratology and fictionality. His current project is on human sexuality and the roles of imagination and fictionality in human sexual practices and preferences.