The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize

Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, provides $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward the winning author’s expenses for attending the Narrative Conference at which the award will be presented.

The Perkins Prize is awarded to the most significant contribution to the study of narrative within a given year. It is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. All books on the topic of narrative, whether monographs, edited collections, or collaboratively written books, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators.

Call for Nominations: 2025 Perkins Prize

To be eligible for this year's prize, books must have a copyright date of 2023.

The winner of the competition for books published in 2023 will be announced on the Narrative listserv by the end of the calendar year, with the prize awarded at the 2025 International Conference on Narrative. Winners receive $1000 (USD) plus $500 (USD) towards expenses to the attend the ISSN conference.

Nominations may come from authors or publishers. Please send one hard copy each to the three judges for this year's prize by JUNE 15th, 2024:

Elizabeth Alsop (City University of New York)

657 E. 26th Street Apt 3P

Brooklyn, NY 11210

Gretchen Busl (Texas Women’s University)

English, Rhetoric, & Spanish,

CFO 905
P.O. Box 425829
Denton, TX 76204-5829

Erin James (University of Idaho)

430 E Seventh St

Moscow, Idaho, USA

83843

2024 Perkins Prize Winner

Marco Caracciolo, Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities

The Perkins Prize committee, consisting of Paul Dawson, Natalya Bekhta, and Virginia Pignagnoli, has chosen Marco Caracciolo’s book, Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities, published by Nebraska University Press in 2022, for the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize. Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities provides a significant exploration of contemporary narratives of the ecological crisis by focusing on slowness as a distinctive quality of narrative and its embodied reception to envision the interconnectedness of human communities and the nonhuman world. Caracciolo makes an outstanding contribution to the study of narrative through an innovative and sophisticated investigation of the challenge that climate as a complex nonlinear system poses to the human apprehension of environmental emergency. Moving beyond existing storytelling models, he focuses on the interactions between formal strategies and the audience’s affective experience, demonstrating how slow narrative produces an embodied engagement with textual form beyond the teleological drive for closure. The powerful insight this book puts forth is indeed the call for an attunement towards slowness not only as narrative pace but as a mode of attention able to oppose the fast logics of nature exploitation. Instead of a hierarchical and instrumentalizing way of perceiving the nonhuman world, the focus on slowness advocated in this book works through defamiliarizing strategies that produce a thick state of absorption revealing our material entanglement with the environment.

Caracciolo’s proposal to address the nonlinearity of climate change includes analysis of a broad range of literary, visual, and video game narratives by Lauren Groff, Paul Harding, Ben Marcus, A.S. Byatt, J. M. Coetzee, Thalia Field, Richard Flanagan, Mark Danielewski, Thierry Cheyrol, and Clément Vuillier. The committee was impressed by his thorough investigation of the stylistic devices that create slowness and by the suitability of this approach to the ethical challenges of engaging with the nonhuman world. The theoretical model presented throughout the chapters of Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities is well-versed in current debates in narrative theory and literary criticism, but enriches these through interdisciplinary encounters with concepts from psychology, anthropology, material ecocriticism, and philosophy of mind. We believe that it is especially thanks to the texture of these productive exchanges that Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities is capable of having an important impact on ecocritical approaches to narrative and beyond.

Honorable Mention:

Peter Friederici, Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope (MIT Press, 2022)

For at least a decade now, the study of narrative broadly conceived has been grappling with the question of how narratives can help us grasp the scale of the unfolding climate catastrophe and whether they can provide answers to why humankind seems incapable of adequate action in response. Much of this work has focussed on how narrative fiction can motivate us to take such action. Peter Friederici’s Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope (MIT Press, 2022) offers a fresh contribution to this debate by looking beyond literary fiction to discuss the broad influence in the public sphere of narrative as a cultural script, a structuring pattern of thought, and a strategic perspective on events. Beyond Climate Breakdown offers its carefully optimistic answers in a polemical and rhetorically persuasive style that challenges the conventions of scholarly prose at the same time as it challenges how we think about narrative and its uses.

Articulating some of the most debated topics in the field of narrative studies, such as imagining climate futures and the complexity of climate change and its resistance to narrativization, Friederici proceeds to approach the problem from multiple angles. His ambition is to offer new ways of thinking and talking about climate breakdown by analysing the pervasiveness of narrative in relation to a variety of available symbolic forms in the cultural field. Friederici’s book draws attention to the role of genre in the debate about storytelling responses to climate; or, more precisely, to the role of symbolic modalities (metaphorical, tragic and comic) that may help reorient set conventions of public discourse dominated by the narrative mode. It also offers unconventional interpretations of familiar discourses, comparing charts of economic growth to the graph of narrative progression to draw attention to how this dominant way of thinking is part of the problem. Finally, it tests the evasiveness of language itself, the inertia encoded in phrases such as greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change, proposing “climate breakdown” as the most apt and urgent signifier. Overall, Beyond Climate Breakdown may be read as a compelling intervention in debates about climate and narrative inspired by a truly utopian impulse to transcend the no-longer-productive but still widely accepted terms of the debate itself.

Past Prize Winners

2023

Carolin Gebauer, Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021)

2022

Natalya Bekhta We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020)

2021

Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (New York: NYU Press, 2019)

2020

Ruth Page, Narratives Online: Shared Stories on Social Media (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018

2019

Rita Charon et al., The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Honorable Mention: Christopher González, Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2017).

2018

Kent Puckett, Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2016).

2017

Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

Honorable Mention: Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds.), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015).

2016

Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P 2014).

Honorable Mention: Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (2014).

2015

Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago, The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2013)

Honorable Mention: Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (de Gruyter, 2013)

2014

Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2012).

2013

Edward Adams, Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (Charlotte, VA: U of Virginia P, 2011).

Honorable Mention: Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011)

2012

Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010).

Honorable Mention: Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010).

Honorable Mention: A.C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity (Oxford, 2005).

2006

Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Duke University Press, 2004).

Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

2005

Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (University Press of Virginia, 2003).

2004

David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)

Jorgen Dines Johansen, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

2003

Amy Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)

Michael Whitmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford University Press, 2001)

2002

Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Honorable Mention: Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)

2001

Robert L.Caserio, The Novel in England, 1900-1950: History and Theory (Twayne Publishers, 1999)

Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

2000

Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)

Dorothy J. Hale, Social formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford University Press, 1998)

Honorable Mentions

Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1998)

Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)

Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998

1999

Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)

1998

Judith Roof, Come As You Are (Columbia University Press, 1996)

Monika Fludernik, Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (Routledge, 1996)

1997

Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Harvard University Press, 1995)

1996

Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994)