This theory-to-practice guide offers mental health practitioners a powerful narrative-based approach to working with clients in clinical practice. It opens with a primer on contemporary narrative theory and offers a robust framework based on the art and techniques of listening for deeper, more meaningful understanding and intervention. Chapters expand on these foundational concepts by applying them to a diverse range of populations and issues, among them race and ethnicity, human sexuality, immigration, and the experience of trauma, grief, and loss. The author’s engaging voice, thoughtful pedagogical style, and extensive use of examples and exercises also work together to inform the reader’s own narrative of growth and self-knowledge. Included in the coverage:• Encountering the self, encountering the other: narratives of race and ethnicity.• Surviving together: individual and communal narratives in the wake of tragedy.• Spiritual stories: exploring ultimate meaning in social work practice.• Sexual stories: narratives of sexual identity, gender, and sexual development.• Leaving home, finding home: narrative practice with immigrant populations.• Moving on: narrative perspectives on grief and loss. Narrative Theory in Clinical Social Work Practice is geared toward students as well as seasoned social workers, and professionals and practitioners in related clinical fields interested in informing their work with a narrative approach.

Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to the field. It presents narrative theory as an approach to understanding all kinds of cultural production: from literary texts to historiography, from film and videogames to philosophical discourse. It takes the long historical view, outlines essential concepts, and reflects on the way narrative forms connect with and rework social forms. The volume analyzes central premises, identifies narrative theory's feminist foundations, and elaborates its significance to queer theory and issues of race. The specially commissioned essays are exciting to read, uniting accessibility and rigor, traditional concerns with a renovated sense of the field as a whole, and analytical clarity with stylistic dash. Topical and substantial, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory is an engaging resource on a key contemporary concept.

This volume explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth and twenty-first century theories of narrative, aiming not to argue that modern narratologies simply present 'old wine in new wineskins', but rather to identify the diachronic affinities shared between ancient and modern stories about storytelling. By recognizing that modern narratologists bring a particular expertise to bear upon ancient literary theory, and by interrogating ancient and modern narratologies through the mutually imbricating dynamics of their reception, it seeks to arrive at a better understanding of both. Each chapter selects a key moment in the history of narratology on which to focus, providing an overview of significant phases before offering detailed analyses of core theories and texts, from the Russian formalists and Chicago school neo-Aristotelians, through the prestructuralists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, up to the latest unnatural and antimimetic narratologists. The reception history that thus unfolds offers some remarkable plot twists and yields valuable insights into the interpretation of some notoriously difficult ancient works. Plato in the Republic is unmasked as an unreliable narrator and theorist, while Aristotle's On Poets reveals a rare glimpse of the philosopher putting narrative theory into practice in the role of storyteller. Horace's Ars Poetica and the works of ancient scholia by critics and commentators evince a rhetorically conceived poetics and sophisticated reader-response-based narratology which indicate a keen interest in audience affect and cognition - anticipating the cognitive turn in narratology's most recent postclassical phase.

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

This is the first book to extend the narrative lens to explore the contribution of narrative to social work values and ethics, social policy and our understanding of the self in social, cultural and political context.

Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding how space works in narrative and narrative theory and how narratives work in real space. Thus far, space has traditionally been viewed by narratologists as a backdrop to plot. This study argues that space serves important but under-explored narrative roles: It can be a focus of attention, a bearer of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment, a means of strategic planning, a principle of organization, and a supporting medium. Space intersects with narrative in two principal ways: ''Narrating space'' considers space as an object of representation, while ''spatializing narrative'' approaches space as the environment in which narrative is physically deployed. The inscription of narrative in real space is illustrated by such forms as technology-supported locative narratives, street names, and historical/heritage site and museum displays. While narratologists are best equipped to deal with the narration of space, geographers can make significant contributions to narratology by drawing attention to the spatialization of narrative. By bringing these two approaches together--and thereby building a bridge between narratology and geography--Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative yields both a deepened understanding of human spatial experience and greater insight into narrative theory and poetic forms.

Provides extensions and reconceptions of unnatural narratology, and intervenes in major debates in narratology, critical theory, and narrative analysis.

The first extended account of the concepts and history of unnatural narrative.