This open access book considers the stories of adolescents and young adults from different regions of the world who use digital media as instruments and stages for storytelling, or who make the media the subject of story telling. These narratives discuss interconnectedness, self-staging, and managing boundaries. From the perspective of media and cultural research, they can be read as responses to the challenges of contemporary society. Providing empirical evidence and thought-provoking explanations, this book will be useful to students and scholars who wish to uncover how ongoing processes of cultural transformation are reflected in the thoughts and feelings of the internet generation.

The Narrative Reader provides a comprehensive survey of theories of narrative from Plato to Post-Structuralism. The broad selection of texts demonstrate the extent to which narrative permeates the entire field of literature & culture

Byron Almén proposes an original synthesis of approaches to musical narrative from literary criticism, semiotics, historiography, musicology, and music theory, resulting in a significant critical reorientation of the field. This volume includes an extensive survey of traditional approaches to musical narrative illustrated by a wide variety of musical examples that highlight the range and applicability of the theoretical apparatus. Almén provides a careful delineation of the essential elements and preconditions of musical narrative organization, an eclectic analytical model applicable to a wide range of musical styles and repertoires, a classification scheme of narrative types and subtypes reflecting conceptually distinct narrative strategies, a wide array of interpretive categories, and a sensitivity to the dependence of narrative interpretation on the cultural milieu of the work, its various audiences, and the analyst. A Theory of Musical Narrative provides both an excellent introduction to an increasingly important conceptual domain and a complex reassessment of its possibilities and characteristics.

This book builds upon and contributes to the growing academic interest in feminism within the field of children's literature studies. Christie Wilkie-Stibbs draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan in her analysis of particular children's literature texts to demonstrate how a feminist analysis opens up textual possibilities that may be applied to works of children's fiction in general, extending the range of textual engagements in children's literature through the application of a new poststructural critical apparati.

Communication and Mental Illness is a comprehensive and practical textbook written by a multidisciplinary group of experts in the field of mental health which will be of interest to all those interested in improving their understanding of individuals with mental illness. The book is divided into three parts. The first of these offers both student and experienced clinicians in the mental health field an improved theoretical knowledge of the methods of communication commonly adopted by individuals with a variety of diagnoses of mental illness. It also provides practical suggestions of how this information can improve the individual professional's management of patients. Part Two looks at how information about communication in mental illness can influence service provision, ending with suggestions for future policy and practice. Communication and Mental Illness concludes with a final part describing the state of current research into different facets of communication and mental illness, offering an insight into the variety of research methodology and points of interest to those involved in the field.

The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: A Dialogue with Unreason traces the complex, scattered criticism of Poe's most anomalous work, as it has steadily grown in prominence to a central position in the study of Poe and American literature. The winding route the criticism of Pym has charted, as convoluted as the narrative itself, has been a history of disagreement at almost every level at which critics and scholars read texts--including the nature and genre of the work, the seriousness or levity of the author's intent, and its stature as a work of genius, hackwork, or something in between. The unique set of thematic and narrative problems the work poses has eluded every hermeneutic structure brought against it so far, consistently undermining the very reading strategies it seems to invite. The only comprehensive critical history and bibliography of Pym, this study fills a large hole Poe scholars have long felt, as it analyzes the ways in which critics and critical camps have attempted to confront, rationalize, contain, or evade its novel and disturbing features. In the process, the criticism is correlated with the popular reception and the international response. Because literary history has entangled no author with his work more than Poe, ultimately this book is as much a study of Poe as of Pym. At every point, therefore, this study embeds the critical response to Pym in the history of Poe studies in general, as well as in the larger context of American literary theory and history. Includes bibliography and index.

The rhetorical theory of narrative that emerges from these investigations emphasizes the recursive relationships between authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response, even as it remains open to insights from a range of critical approaches - including feminism, psychoanalysis, Bakhtinian linguistics, and cultural studies. The rhetorical criticism Phelan advocates and employs seeks, above all, to attend carefully to the multiple demands of reading sophisticated narrative; for that reason, his rhetorical theory moves less toward predictions about the relationships between techniques, ethics, and ideologies and more toward developing some principles and concepts that allow us to recognize the complex diversity of narrative art.