With its extensive international distribution and lengthy publishing history, some scholars consider Ernst Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868) to have had a greater impact on the public’s reception of the theory of evolution than Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) (Oppenheimer, Jane M. 2016. Haeckel’s variations on Darwin. In Biological metaphor and cladistic classification , 123–136. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Richards, Robert J. 2008. The tragic sense of life: Ernst Haeckel and the struggle over evolutionary thought . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press: 223–224). The book was as provocative in its anti-clerical stance as it was in its scientific scope, claiming that evolution made “development” the “magical word” for solving all the riddles of our natural environment (Haeckel, Ernst. 1868a. Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte [Natural history of creation], 1st edn. Berlin: Georg Reimer: iv). This paper examines how Haeckel’s narrative strategies contributed to the book’s scandalous appeal and lasting reception. Its structural parallels to the biblical Genesis and its English translation – which omitted the fact that there was talk of a natural history of creation – suggest a deliberate blurring of theological and scientific registers, unsettling and attracting readers alike. On the one hand, the book garnered a wide following, especially among lay audiences and progressive cultural critics. On the other, it contributed to Haeckel’s marginalization in certain theological and scientific circles. Thus, analyzing Haeckel’s narrative reveals the careful balance required to deliberately “scandalize” narrative styles in order to make one’s case, whether in broader society or among specific readerships.
In this study, we analyze two instances of highly mediatized relations between producers of popular culture and their fans. We argue that in such relations, there is a narrative push and pull between creator and audience around rules of engagement: explicitly or implicitly stated agreements about what audiences may expect and creators are expected to deliver. Breaking these rules can be experienced as deeply shocking. Our first case is Bill Drummond, one half of the KLF, a British rave duo from the early 1990s infamous for exiting the music industry in 1992 by shooting blanks at the audience of the BRIT Awards and burning 1 pound million. Since then, Drummond has written two memoirs in which he describes, often with relish, how he is a disappointment to his fans. Our second case is HBO's Game of Thrones, which - like many big-budget television series - developed and capitalized on a massive fanbase, resulting in a strong aesthetic and value-driven investment among fans. These fans emphatically turned on the showrunners during the series' final season, furiously disappointed by what they saw as the show's failed storytelling, especially its finale. In the first case, fans are intentionally scandalized; in the second, certainly not.
Kate Elizabeth Russell's controversial novel My Dark Vanessa (2020) explores grooming, consent, and the delayed recognition of abuse through its protagonist's first-person narration. Through close reading, the study traces how Vanessa Wye's internal voice reframes coercion as love, rendering the abuse emotionally and cognitively inaccessible for much of her life. The central focus lies in analyzing how My Dark Vanessa uses normalization, romanticization, and the reversal of power dynamics to blur the protagonist's years-long experiences with her teacher, delaying and complicating the slow and painful recognition of abuse. Combining scandal theory with theories of unreliable narration, this article argues that Vanessa's unreliability stems not from deception but from the depth of her internalized grooming. Her narration - shaped by denial, affective bias, and distorted memory - functions to draw the reader into the same confusion that prolongs her silence. The novel's temporal shifts between 2000 and 2017 thereby mirror a changing cultural landscape shaped by the #MeToo movement, ultimately addressing ideas of agency, complicity, and power.
Epistolary fiction is commonly defined as a particular form of literary narrative that imitates letters or digital correspondence, for instance e-mail or communication via social media. Narratological studies of epistolarity have been preoccupied with identifying structural features that define this form of narrative and consequently distinguish epistolary fiction as a certain novelistic genre. This article argues that it can be problematic to approach epistolarity within a structuralist, narratological framework. The traditional view of epistolary fiction as a genre, assumed to be defined by specific formal constituents, is concerned with classification and this article demonstrates that generic labels often obscure how epistolarity functions in specific literary works, as exemplified in readings of Sam Lipsyte's Home Land (2004. Home land. New York: Picador) and George Saunders's "Ghoul" (2022. Liberation day. London: Bloomsbury Publishing). To examine the various ways in which contemporary authors utilize epistolary conventions and traditions, the article suggests that epistolarity should instead be approached as a rhetorical resource in literary fiction.
With its extensive international distribution and lengthy publishing history, some scholars consider Ernst Haeckel's Nat & uuml;rliche Sch & ouml;pfungsgeschichte (1868) to have had a greater impact on the public's reception of the theory of evolution than Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) (Oppenheimer, Jane M. 2016. Haeckel's variations on Darwin. In Biological metaphor and cladistic classification, 123-136. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Richards, Robert J. 2008. The tragic sense of life: Ernst Haeckel and the struggle over evolutionary thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press: 223-224). The book was as provocative in its anti-clerical stance as it was in its scientific scope, claiming that evolution made "development" the "magical word" for solving all the riddles of our natural environment (Haeckel, Ernst. 1868a. Nat & uuml;rliche Sch & ouml;pfungsgeschichte [Natural history of creation], 1st edn. Berlin: Georg Reimer: iv). This paper examines how Haeckel's narrative strategies contributed to the book's scandalous appeal and lasting reception. Its structural parallels to the biblical Genesis and its English translation - which omitted the fact that there was talk of a natural history of creation - suggest a deliberate blurring of theological and scientific registers, unsettling and attracting readers alike. On the one hand, the book garnered a wide following, especially among lay audiences and progressive cultural critics. On the other, it contributed to Haeckel's marginalization in certain theological and scientific circles. Thus, analyzing Haeckel's narrative reveals the careful balance required to deliberately "scandalize" narrative styles in order to make one's case, whether in broader society or among specific readerships.
Scandals and the shocks they provoke have long shaped the cultural, political, and aesthetic imagination of the Western world. They expose and disrupt social norms, yet by doing so, they make those very norms visible and subject to renegotiation. This special issue, Narratives of Scandal and Shock: Transgression, Media, and Cultural Response, explores how scandalous narratives emerge, circulate, and transform across literary, historical, and medial contexts. Drawing on narrative theory, literary studies, and cultural history, the contribution examine how transgressive acts, authors, and texts incite public outrage and fascination, compelling societies to re-evaluate morality, authorship, and cultural identity. The issue investigates how scandal operates as both an aesthetic strategy and a social mechanism-arresting thought through shock, provoking affective engagement, and at times catalyzing change. Case studies range from classical and nineteenth-century controversies to contemporary debates surrounding #MeToo, autofiction, and transgressive literature, to name just a few examples. Together, these essays demonstrate that scandal and shock are not mere disruptions but productive forces in the ongoing negotiation of cultural values and artistic expression.
Narrative fiction that aims for shock value exhibits two conflicting tendencies: it aims to be disturbing and repelling while simultaneously sparking readers' fascination and drawing them closer. This dynamic is particularly fundamental for a subset of transgressive fiction we could call extreme fiction, ranging from prewar surrealist provocations to seedy 1970s exploitation and horror paperbacks to post-punk-influenced 1990s serial killer smashes and beyond to contemporary literary and popular fiction. These kinds of works embrace this contradiction through shocking representation of sadistic violence and sexual transgression that lures readers in precisely by being so nauseatingly repelling. In this article I analyze common affective narrative strategies that extreme fiction uses to simultaneously repel and fascinate readers. I examine how affective responses from readers are encoded into texts that often prefigure their reception by real readers. Drawing on several case studies, my analysis suggests that extreme fiction is anti-aesthetic by nature: through shock tactics, transgression of moral norms, and extreme themes it aims for affective responses that result in a puzzling combination of distaste and enjoyment in readers. Ultimately, I argue that extreme fiction forms a limit case of literature, which requires new narratological and aesthetic theorizing to make full sense of it.
This article examines authorial ethos in Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson's literary response to the crisis in the Swedish Academy 2017-2018, marked by allegations of misconduct and by institutional upheaval. Through a textual analysis of Frostenson's quartet K (2019), F - en f & auml;rd (2020, "F - a journey"), A. Andra tankar (2021, "A. Other thoughts"), and Alma (2023), the article traces how these works constitute a literary scandal in its own right through their presentation of a counternarrative. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the literary field and Liesbeth Korthals Altes' work on ethos, the analysis demonstrates how Frostenson's established cultural capital becomes both a resource and a liability. The article identifies three key narrative strategies: discursive reframing, extensive intertextuality that reinforces symbolic capital, and oblique invocations of political persecution. These strategies reveal the tension between Frostenson's prior literary authority and the ethos-building in the works at hand. The Swedish Academy's traditional role as cultural arbiter becomes a site of disruption of Frostenson's authorial ethos.
In 2017, the MeToo movement generated a shock of recognition and sparked high-profile media scandals when exposing both individual misconduct and systemic sexism. The movement also took on a literary form as many authors wrote about issues of sexual violence and engaged readers through innovative narrative strategies. In this paper, we investigate, specifically, the use of second-person narration as a narrative strategy in the MeToo novel The Rose Rule (original title: Rosenreglen, 2019) by Danish author Liv Nimand Duv & aring;. We ask: How does the use of second-person narration demonstrate the haunted temporalities of survivor experiences, thus becoming a means of generating reader response and reflection? In doing so, we argue that the MeToo novel undoes linear temporalities and traditional narrative functions to probe the collective and previously silenced nature of systemic sexism. Drawing on narrative theory (e.g., Herman. 1994. Textual you and double deixis in Edna O'Brien's A Pagan Place. Style 28(3). 378-410) and hauntology (Derrida. 2006. Specters of marx. New York & London: Routledge), we examine how the ghost stories of the MeToo movement inform us that what has been buried and silenced returns to haunt the present (Gordon. 2008. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: xvi) and how Duv & aring;, through the combination of two types of second-person narration (Meyer. 2024. Dufort ae llinger i dansk litteratur [second-person narratives in Danish literature]. Aarhus: Aarhus University dissertation), addresses the reader by stating not only MeToo, but asking YouToo?
This article explores the transnational reception of Arab women writers whose works are frequently subject to censorship in their home countries for addressing so-called taboo subjects such as gender and sexuality. It focuses on the novels Women and Sex (1972) by Nawal El Saadawi and Girls of Riyadh (2005) by Rajaa Alsanea and considers how these works are both situated within a broader discourse on Arab women's literature. This article argues that although the global literary marketplace offers platforms for these voices, it also casts Arab women as either victims of repression or figures of exotic defiance. Both authors reframe the political as something deeply embedded in everyday life. Rather than treating the visibility of these texts as purely emancipatory, this article demonstrates how relationships, especially those formed between women in the private sphere and epistolary form, do not simply reflect political positions but actively constitute them. In tracing how such texts move across geopolitical and cultural borders, the article ultimately calls for a more situated reading practice, one attentive to how local contexts, censorship regimes, and market demands shape what stories are told, and how they are heard.
Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (2009-11) sparked controversy not only through its unflinching personal revelations, but by exposing the private lives of others. While some of the novel's most controversial episodes recall past literary scandals, from Ulysses to Lolita, the strongest reactions came from the author's own family, who felt betrayed by their portrayals. Yet across its six volumes, the narrative gradually transforms into a more layered and reflective project, marked by empathy and self-reflection. Through autofiction, Knausgaard explores evolving norms around fatherhood, mental illness, and social shame in contemporary Nordic society. My Struggle reveals literature's unique power to confront cultural taboos and articulate experiences often left unspoken. At the same time, it underscores literature's capacity to harm those unwillingly included in its pages. The ethical dilemma persists: Can literary truth-telling justify breaching the unspoken social contracts between writers and those closest to them? This article argues that My Struggle enacts this very tension, compelling readers, critics, and writers to reconsider the role and responsibility of literature in navigating both personal and collective truth.
This article examines how fictionality shaped the so-called "Corsair affair" between Danish philosopher S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard and Corsaren, the most feared satirical weekly in Denmark in the mid-1800s. While the controversy's sad aftermath for Kierkegaard has been studied in established Kierkegaard research, the techniques, devices, and dynamics of the scandal have received scant attention. This study argues that fictionality makes the Corsaren feud a scandal of a special kind. After Kierkegaard's request to be mocked in Corsaren, the weekly hoaxed Kierkegaard by falsely inscribing texts to his pseudonyms and attributing his writings to incorrect authors, like new pseudonyms devised by Corsaren. Drawing on the rhetoric of fictionality, this study argues that Corsaren's hoaxes signaled their inventedness. Both Kierkegaard's pseudonymity and Corsaren's fictional hoaxes involve a notion of pretense. However, the scandal escalated due to certain differences between the parties. Those differences are referred to as "disparities," as they are significant to the dynamics of the scandal and deal with the unfair purposes of the parties. One of the main disparities concerns Corsaren's caricatures. They targeted Kierkegaard's outward appearance, and further on, prompted public outrage. By hoaxing, Corsaren questioned Kierkegaard's pseudonymous method, as the pseudonyms varied between literary characters and mouthpieces for Kierkegaard's thoughts. Corsaren's case shows that fictionality, as an interplay between pretense and signaling, works as an indirect means of communication.
Elizabeth Bowen's novel To the North (1932) presents, at the level of plot development, a moral fable about the reconstruction of order and the perils of uncontrolled passion. However, when examined through the lens of the theory of dual narrative progression, it becomes evident that beneath the surface plot runs a parallel, covert progression centered on the death of eros, revealing the author's concerns about the alienation of human nature in modern society. These two narrative progressions develop in parallel and complement each other in both thematic significance and characterization. This structure enables the novel to transcend simple moral judgment and to articulate a more complex and profound reflection on the predicament of modernity.
This article discusses the capacity of climate fiction to construct master and counter-narratives as part of the logic of its storyworlds, and to use such narrative structures to both (1) represent climate change as a grand-scale problem requiring collective action and (2) function as environmentally oriented counter-narratives to currently dominant discourses. Drawing from both sociolinguistic and philosophical approaches to master or “grand” narratives, this two-pronged analytical approach is prompted by two thorny questions in environmental humanities and ecocritical literary studies. Firstly, can climate change, as a grand-scale complex system, be usefully represented in narrative form? Secondly, how can climate fiction contribute to public discourse around climate change, and to what effect? While these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered within the scope of one article, the inquiry they inform here yields new insight into how master and counter-narratives can be usefully employed, as narratological concepts, for investigating the expressive and persuasive potential of climate fiction. Regarded as literary devices, they can be fruitfully analyzed as tools for world-building that facilitate representing disruptive environmental and societal change as a matter of narrative contestation of the storyworld. Understood in terms of rhetoric, on the other hand, reading climate fiction as counter-narration provides a new framework for assessing the potential of such grand-scale storytelling as meaningful political action.
This article studies the role of dialogues, oppositional positioning and small stories in telling counter-narratives in fiction. The countering itself is understood as intentional action and as a communicative strategy, which raises the question about how this resistance is expressed or signalled. To answer these questions, Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed are studied from the perspective of counter-narration, including the role of embedded dialogues and oppositional narrative positioning in marking counter-narratives. This approach, drawing on small stories research, foregrounds the counter-narratives’ capacity to resort to factuality within fiction, which addresses the narrative contests of social world in a different way than purely fictional discourse. The narratological study of counter-narratives encourages thus the integration of small stories research and positioning analyses more closely into the analytic repertoire of narratology.
This article analyzes narrative contestation as presented in a novel’s storyworld and narration by an implied author orchestrating meanings in the novel. The aim is to test master and counter-narratives as a methodological concept in the analysis of literary fiction with its specific, multilayered communicative structure. Particularly the fiction-specific concept of implied author as the nexus for interpretation is discussed as a potential key for transporting the theory on master and counter narratives to the fictional realm. The analysis of the Finnish novel Röyhkeys ( Arrogance , 2017) by Ossi Nyman investigates how the theory of master and counter-narratives could be used to illuminate the values of the constructed implied author in literary fiction. The results contribute to the theoretical discussion on master and counter-narratives, particularly on the narrative means to indicate countering and to draw on master narratives. They also indicate the ways in which the communicative layers specific to fiction affect the analysis and interpretation of mastering and countering with narratives.
Under what conditions can works of fiction serve counter-narrative aims? If the reified claims of a national narrative purport to be grounded in fact, can they be successfully challenged or dismantled by works of admittedly imaginative status? This essay singles out five strategies that occur with particular frequency in novels and stories that manifestly push back against a national Israeli narrative: multiple and variable focalization, analepsis, doubling, chiastic or conversion plots, and negative or counterfactual plotting. I argue, however, that adherence to fact is the necessary grounding for realist fiction to succeed as counter-narrative, though speculative and counterfactual novels offer their own path toward upending a master text. Ultimately, of course, the success of counter-narrative fiction will depend on the response of its readers. The counter-narrativity of fiction might therefore be best understood as a reading effect rather than as a textual quality. The testimony of readers does, however, provide ample evidence that fiction has rich counter-narrative capabilities.
W.J.T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry . He is an iconology and cultural studies expert, and his works include Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), Cloning Terror (2011) and the collection of influent essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005), awarded the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. This conversation with W.J.T. Mitchell focuses on the image media representation of the ongoing Israeli attacks in Gaza to develop an approach to the visual particularities of this event. This interview aims to gain insight from cultural and visual studies about how conflict is represented and perceived in society, the media or contemporary culture. In light of his previous works Cloning Terror and “Eyeless in Gaza,” we explore and contrast the role and typology of the actual spreading of war images and how these can affect and even turn our perception of the events.
Philip Roth’s 2000 novel The Human Stain wades directly into the ethical and emotional complexities of “passing,” the attempt by light-skinned African Americans, particularly during the Jim Crow era of American history, to hide their identities in order to assimilate within mainstream White society. The novel presents the case of Professor Coleman Silk, a Black man passing as White, a hidden identity that is compounded by the particular “White” identity that Silk has adopted: Jewish. Roth has reduced the distance between his own (Jewish) experience and that of a passing African American by providing Silk with an adopted Jewish identity. Thus, Roth engages – in possibly irreconcilable ways – with two master-narratives. On the one hand, he counters a master-narrative of White supremacy by revealing the debilitating experience of hiddenness – both Black and, by implication, Jewish – as represented in one man. However, the novel also reinforces – without any implication of counter-narration – another master-narrative that presents “identity politics” primarily as a narrowminded attempt to police social discourse. These contradictory impulses ultimately muddle the rhetorical persuasiveness of a novel that both challenges one form of discriminatory discourse, while reinforcing another. While the fictional mode itself enables Roth to attempt to inhabit Coleman’s complex experience, the novel ultimately misses an opportunity to effectively challenge, through counter-narration, the ethical dimensions of that story.
