Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots

In many fictional narratives, the progression of the plot exists in tension with a very different and powerful dynamic that runs, at a hidden and deeper level, throughout the text. In this volume, Dan Shen systematically investigates how stylistic analysis is indispensable for uncovering this covert progression through rhetorical narrative criticism. The book brings to light the covert progressions in works by the American writers Edgar Allan Poe, Stephan Crane and Kate Chopin and British writer Katherine Mansfield.

Dan Shen is Changjiang Professor of English Language and Literature at Peking University, China. She is on the advisory or editorial boards of the American journals Style and Narrative, the British Language and Literature, and the European JLS: Journal of Literary Semantics, as well as being a consultant editor of Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.