Brian Richardson

Brian Richardson’s major areas of research are international modernism, postmodernism, narrative theory, and the history of the novel. He has published seven books, edited twelve collections of essays, and published over 100 articles. These deal with a range of topics, including modern fiction, narrative theory, reader response theory, the theory of fictionality, the
narratives of literary history, aesthetic value, feminist analysis, and the poetics of modern drama. His current projects focus on modernist fiction. His future research will feature studies of the fiction of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Much of his work has been engaged with narrative theory as he attempted to expand existing models to be able to incorporate more radical techniques and practices of modern and postmodern experimental fiction. His first book, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, is primarily about fictional worlds; its emphasis is on characters’ (and readers’) interpretations of the storyworld they inhabit and its governing causal system. His next monograph, Unnatural Voices, explored unusual and impossible narrators and acts of narration. That book analyzed unusual voices in several of Beckett’s works and examined second- and first-person plural narration. It was awarded the Perkins Prize for the year’s best book in narrative studies. His book, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, moves on to the stories themselves, how they are fabricated and how they are unfolded, and thus presents another pillar of an interconnected theory of fictional worlds, narration, and story. Another book, The Reader in Modernist Fiction, analyses representations of characters as readers and the implications of their fates for the theory of the reader. It includes substantial discussions of works by James, Conrad, Joyce, Wharton, Mansfield, Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett, Ellison, Calvino, and others. A final volume on fictional characters is in preparation. In the jointly authored volume, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Current Debates, written with David Herman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, each scholar provides a condensed overview of their positions on several subjects: authors and narrators, story and temporality, narrative space, characters, readers and reception, and narrative and aesthetic value. The book was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title. Richardson has written another volume that elucidates the general theory and outlines the history of antirealist or “unnatural” narratives: Unnatural Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice; this book includes a chapter on unnatural narratives by feminist, postcolonial, and U. S. Ethnic authors. In his latest book he assembles a cluster of essays on these and adjacent topics: Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts (2021). A book of his selected writings on narrative theory has been translated into Czech. A study of Conrad’s narrative practices is nearing completion.

He has edited or co-edited four anthologies: Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames (2002); Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices (2009); A Poetics of
Unnatural Narratives (with Jan Alber and Henrik Skov Nielsen, 2013; paper 2015); and, with
Jan Alber, Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges (2020). He also guest- edited six special issues of journals, including an issue of Style that was devoted to analyses of
his work. His scholarly articles have appeared in ELH, New Literary History, Twentieth Century Literature, Critique, Studies in the Novel, College English, Philological Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Drama, The James Joyce Quarterly, Partial Answers, and many other journals. His work has been translated into French, German, Czech, Chinese, Danish, Arabic, Portuguese, Turkish, Spanish, Magyar, Italian, and Farsi and is forthcoming in Polish. He served as president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and of the Joseph Conrad Society of America and is on the editorial boards of Conradiana, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, and Compendium: Journal of Comparative Studies. He has given nine keynote addresses and sixty-five invited lectures in twenty countries, including Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Israel, China, and Singapore. He has taught at the University of Florida and the University of Tübingen, given Masterclasses at the University of Giessen, and has offered seminars at Aarhus University, the University of Bologna, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Lisbon, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.