Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar. She is the author or editor of many books, including Narrative across Media: The Language of Storytelling (Nebraska, 2004) and Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Tang Weisheng is chair professor in the College of Foreign Studies at Jiangxi Normal University, in Jiangxi, China. He is the author of two books in Mandarin on narratology, A Study on Narrative of Thingness and Text, Context, and Reader: Study on Contemporary American Narratology.

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction1. Representing Objects: The Mimetic Function2. Designing Stories with Objects: The Thematic, Strategic and Structural Functions3. Experiencing Otherness: Rick Bass’s Deep Ecology Narratives4. The Horror of Sentient Things: Edgar Allan Poe5. Ordinary Objects, Accumulation, and Design: Karl Ove Knausgaard and Nicholson Baker6. Overhumanized versus Radically Alien Objects: Orhan Pamuk and Jean-Paul Sartre7. Consumerism, Hoarding, and Liberation from Possession: Georges Perec and Ruth Ozeki8. Enchantment of Things: Objects in Classic Chinese Literature9. Telling Stories with Objects: Multimodal ManifestationsConclusionSource AcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndex

“Object-Oriented Narratology takes on a little-addressed yet crucial component of narratives: objects or things, not as part of some other function, but on their own merits. As such it helps us dig deeper into our reading of and immersion in storyworlds, and it creates a richer understanding of the objects that make up those worlds. It is clearly written and thought-provoking.”-Annjeanette Wiese, author of Narrative Truthiness: The Logic of Complex Truth in Hybrid (Non)Fiction “The authors raise stimulating philosophical questions, situating narrative theory within a broader, interdisciplinary debate on the status of the object.”-Marco Caracciolo, author of Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities