DIEGESIS is the first interdisciplinary journal dedicated to narrative research that offers free online access to full-text articles and reviews. Edited by senior members of the Center for Narrative Research (CNR) at the University of Wuppertal, and hosted by the institution’s Center for Information and Media Processing in cooperation with the university’s library, DIEGESIS is one of the leading resources for cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work on narrative, narrativity and storytelling in all media, contexts and applications, from fiction to film, literature to conversation, and journalism to social networks.

For over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary studies, this engaging book transforms our understanding of literary history. This full text has been made available by the MIT Open Access program.

Story, in the largest sense of the term, is arguably the single most important aspect of narrative. But with the proliferation of antimimetic writing, traditional narrative theory has been inadequate for conceptualizing and theorizing a vast body of innovative narratives. In A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Brian Richardson proposes a new model for evaluating literature—returning to the basis of narrative theory to illuminate how authors play with and help clarify the boundaries of narrative theory. While he focuses on late modernist, postmodern, and contemporary narratives, the study also includes many earlier works, spanning from Aristophanes and Shakespeare through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter.