Understanding narrative

Each of the ten essays is an example of what James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz call "theorypractice": a self-reflexive inquiry that simultaneously interprets and investigates the grounds of interpretation. These essays, in other words, resist the easy and one-way application of fixed theoretical strategies to text. Instead, they call upon a variety of theoretical perspectives to inform their interpretative practice while deploying their interpretations to revise theory.

Although the contributors demonstrate affiliations with different theoretical movements - including Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism, and poststructuralism - their inquiries suggest significant shortcomings in the popular practice of classifying critical output according to a static model of theoretical "schools." The contributors' dynamic theory-practice presented here draws upon diverse theoretical principles according to the specific demands of their inquiries, staking out their arguments not by drawing simple oppositions but by striking different balances in the theoretical material on which they draw.