Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives (Frontiers of Narrative)

Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the multimodal relationship between fictionality and factuality. The contemporary discussion about fictionality coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding the categories of fact and fiction in popular culture and global media. Today’s media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of fictionality, distinct from fiction, specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse.

Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons explicitly interrogate the relationship of fictionality with multimodal strategies of narrative construction in the present media ecology. Contributors consider the ways narrative structures, their reception, and their theoretical frameworks in narratology are influenced and changed by media composition—particularly new media. By accounting for the relationship of multimodal composition with the ontological complexity of narrative worlds, Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives fills a critical gap in contemporary narratology—the discipline that has, to date, contributed most to the conceptualization of fictionality.

Torsa Ghosal is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative. Alison Gibbons is a reader in contemporary stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature and the coeditor of several books, including Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism.