Beowulf as Frame Narrative: A Reassessment of the “Digressions”

The paper examines the implementation of an external written curriculum in the classroom. The study is based on observation of and interviews with 26 Israeli Bible teachers who followed a formal curriculum and used a teachers’ guide. The study identified three types of curriculum narrative: the frame narrative, the task narrative, and the meta‐narrative. Whereas both curriculum writers and teachers were conscious of the existence of the frame and task narratives, neither group was aware of the existence of the curriculum meta‐narrative. Moreover, most teachers felt no obligation to adhere to the curriculum writers’ frame narrative and suggested curriculum activities, and, indeed, some 80% of the curriculum tasks analysed in this study were devised by teachers, not suggested by curriculum writers. Teachers were also unaware of the curriculum writers’ meta‐narrative and constructed their own meta‐narratives, which differed almost completely from that of the writers. This study reveals that the conception of teachers as ‘obedient’ to a written curriculum, which they interpret and adapt while preserving its essential principles, is inconsistent with the teachers’ own curriculum thinking. That thinking, founded on narrative thought, understands both curriculum and teaching as revealed stories which are used as a source of stimulation and inspiration.

Attendance to notable terms promotes narrative frame analysis when students read multiple expository texts

A fundamental feature of many genres of fiction is the alternation between a narrative frame (NF) and quoted inset (QI) dialogue. Both formal and representational features distinguish NF and QI segments. This paper is an explorative study on the stylistic differentiation between frame and inset material in recent commercially successful fiction in Swedish. There are mainly two orthographic options as regards this distinction: Explicitly enclosing inset segments within quotation marks is one. Using an initial dash to indicate utterance display is another, in which case frame and inset material typically alternate in a way not made explicit by the orthography. The corpus behind the present study comprised 450 novels. In order to deal with dash orthography data (135 books), we trained a multilayer perceptron classifier to tell NF and QI segments apart. We relied on the fact that native quotation mark text can be converted to annotated dash orthography data, which can then be used for supervised training and validation. A small-scale manual evaluation on the texts we aim to analyze, yielded an accuracy score around 95%. In order to explore the stylometric relations between NF and QI components in the novels, we looked at a selection of basic grammatical features. A characterization of each feature was made by means of recording the fraction of works in which the relative frequency of the feature is higher in QI than in NF. This summarizes how authors tend to “use” that feature to create a contrast between NF and QI. Another way to examine how the NF and QI styles are related is to apply a correlation test. We then saw, for instance, that QI material in 100% of the books are denser in auxiliary verbs, second person pronouns, and interjections, while NF segments in all or almost all cases are denser in nouns, adjectives, third person pronouns, and prepositions. We could also observe that e.g. noun density in NF and QI correlate in a strong way. The same holds for adverbs and cardinal numerals. This suggests that books and authors exhibit stylistic tendencies which affect both narrator and the characters, as far as the kind of fiction we have studied go.

Frames of Folklore, Frames of Fiction: The Narrative Frames in "El kacuy" and "Marta Riquelme" Bonnie Frederick Washington State University During the period from about 1860 to about 1930, many Hispanic American writers used a narrative frame to give the appearance of oral narrative to their written folkloric sketches and short stories. By feigning orality, the narrative frame evokes an underlying relationship of references, imitations, and contrasts between the oral narrative and the written text. In addition, the frame defines the values and language shared between storytellers and their rhetorical audience; this common bond is manipulated to determine the degree of ideological distance from which the audience is to regard the narrated folkloric events. The congruity or incongruity of the values embodied in the frame relationship with the values embodied in the folkloric event produces different narrative texts. In order to study these differences, three Argentine narratives have been chosen that concern the same folkloric motif: the kacuy bird whose cries are said to be the cries of an abandoned woman. The narratives include the anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche's catalogued report of the tale (1928), the folkloric sketch "El kacuy" (1925) by Ricardo Rojas, and the short story "Marta Riquelme" (1902) by William Henry Hudson. In all three, the original oral tradition exists as an implied subtext, continuing in various ways to influence the written version. The original story ofthe kacuy was an oral tale, told by a storyteller to an audience that held the same cultural beliefs as the storyteller and communicated with the same system of linguistic signs. Studies of oral narrative reveal a typical storytelling pattern of orientation, complicating action, suspension before resolution, resolution, and coda (Labov 369). The orientation and coda form the narrative frame. The frame signals to the hearers that the story is about to begin, and that they must listen in the manner appropriate to such a story. For example, "once upon a time" is the formulaic signal that the events about to be told are ruled by the logic of the magic world, not that ofthe world ofeveryday experience. The frame also closes the narrative with ending formulas that signal to the hearer that the special narrative is over, and ordinary discourse may proceed. Though each narrative performance is unique, the storytellers "must draw 8 Rocky Mountain Review upon past language, symbols, events, and forms which they share with their audience for their narrations to be both comprehensible and meaningful" (Oring 123). These narrative conventions form the metanarrative, that is, the communication between the speaker and the audience that is maintained during the time in which the narrator tells the events. Thus, the frame in an oral tale confirms the common values and language ofthe speaker and audience; the narrative itself is congruent with the audience's general set of beliefs and customs. Disruption of this congruence of language and customs could break the metanarrative relationship, as when the hearer of a joke says "I don't get it" or when the audience laughs at what was meant to be serious. Anthropologists who collect oral tales usually remove the oral narrative frame from the written report of the oral tale, thus forcing the reader's attention away from the storytelling apparatus and focusing instead on the morphology or "deep structure" ofthe story's events. As Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted, the value of the myth "does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells" (210). Without a narrative frame, a folkloric motif in written form generally looks like this Indian legend, collected by the folklorist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche and published in 1928: Dos hermanos, varón y mujer, pasaban el tiempo juntando "balas". Ella era muy mezquina. El en desquite la invitó entonces a subir a un árbol muy alto y se bajó cortando todos los gajos que le servían de apoyo, y se fue a la casa. La hermana que quedó arriba, lloró desesperadamente sin poderse bajar, y siempre llamándolo. Así pasó el tiempo y de tanto llorar se hizo pájaro que siempre grita: Kacuy. (282) This condensed version is a far cry from the original oral...

In a recent article proposing a rethinking of the historiography of black working-class politics in the Jim Crow South, Robin Kelley has suggested that the historian's attention should shift from a focus on political leaders to a consideration of acts of carried out by working people ( 'We Are Not' 76).(1) Taking a cue from such scholars as James C. Scott, Michel de Certeau, and Eugene Genovese, Kelley sets out to find the transcript of a dissident political culture in the urban South during the 1930s and 1940s (77).(2) He explains his rationale for doing so: Beneath the veil of consent lies a hidden history of unorganized, everyday conflict waged by African-American working people. Once we explore in greater detail those daily conflicts and the social and cultural spaces where ordinary people felt free to articulate their opposition, we can begin to ask the questions that will enable us to rewrite the political history of the Jim Crow South to incorporate such actions and actors. (76) Kelley's article discusses forms of resistance as they occurred at home, at work, at play, and in the public at large so as to force a reconsideration of how action in daily life contributed to political change in the South. My aim in this article is to use Kelley's study of working-class resistance to launch a revisionary reading of the narrative frame of Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935). Indeed, Kelley's article begins with an epigraph from Hurston's book in which she debunks the seeming acquiescence of the smiling Negro laborer. In Hurston's collection of folklore, I will argue, the transcript of everyday resistance is exposed through the narrative frame with which she surrounds her transcription of folk(3) tales. This articulation of resistance through folklore is most evident in the middle pages of her book, in which Hurston describes her visit to a lumber camp in Polk County, Florida. In this section, Hurston at first experiences the workers' efforts to resist her intrusion on the scene because they think she is a detective. As she gains their acceptance, however, she is able to record their tales. She displays the migrant laborers telling tales on the job, and in so doing she shows how the tales form a discourse of dissent relating to the conditions of labor in the company town. When Hurston is accepted in the camp, her narrative voice shifts from first-person-singular to third-person. As her authorial presence recedes, the narrative shows us how folklore could be used as a form of resistance in the Jim Crow South. Autobiography, Ethnography, and the Narrative Frame Hurston's narrative frame has long been a topic of study for readers of Mules and Men, and it is worth considering the critical history on this topic before pursuing a revisionary reading of it. Rather than presenting a compendium of folk tales collected from the field, Hurston weaves the tales into an overarching narrative featuring her travels to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, to neighboring Polk County, and to New Orleans. Since the link between these three sites is her traveling, observing self, most studies of the book's narrative frame have centered on the relation between autobiography and ethnography in the text. Her biographer, Robert Hemenway, spells out the questions that animate this line of inquiry: Is Mules and Men about Zora Hurston or about black folklore? If the former, the self-effacement makes the reader want to know more about what was going on in her mind, more about her reaction to the communities that embraced her. If the latter, there is a need for folklore analysis. (167) Hurston's text would seem to blend aspects of the autobiographical travelogue with aspects of the ethnographic study, and Hemenway's questions suggest that the expectations of both genres remain unmet in Mules and Men. Her narrative frame, he argues, frustrates the reader's attempt to understand her relation to the folk she is describing. …

Revisiting narrative frames: An instrument for investigating language teaching and learning

Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Narrative Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Ilka Saal (bio) Coping with trauma entails not only the repair of incurred physical damage but also the reconstruction of shattered narrative structures. As Elaine Scarry insists, “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it” (4). The reconstruction of language is therefore essential not only for the purpose of giving testimony to pain and suffering but also for healing, for the remaking of the world, as theorists of trauma, such as Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, have pointed out. However, such translating of the wound into narrative poses important aesthetic and ethical questions not just with regard to what Caruth has described as the essential incomprehensibility of trauma, but also with regard to what kind of narrative perspectives, structures, and tropes we ultimately deploy to render the ineffable fathomable. Formal decisions are crucial in determining our historical, cultural, and political understanding of the event. [End Page 453] As Judith Butler reminds us, our collective experience of a cataclysmic event always emerges within a particular narrative frame, and it is this very frame that can either open up or preclude “certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries” (4). It decides “in a forceful way, what we can hear, whether a view will be taken as an explanation or as an exoneration, whether we can hear the difference and abide by it” (5). Ultimately, it is also this very narrative frame that determines whether “the experience of violence and loss have to lead straightaway to military violence and retribution” or whether “something can be made of grief besides a cry for war” (xi). With regard to 9/11, Butler points out that while the event momentarily disrupted the American nation’s narcissistic understanding of itself, providing it with an opportunity to acknowledge its interdependency with other nations, the narratives triggered in its wake immediately shored up a first-person perspective that reasserted impenetrable boundaries between self and others.1 With such prompt recentering of its public identity, so Butler maintains, the US forfeited the opportunity to reflect on injury as such, “to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways” (xii). In order to enable reflection on the global power relations that interlink one’s own vulnerability with that of others, one would have to abandon the convenience of a unilateral narrative frame and begin to tell the story differently. What would happen, so Butler asks, if the nation was to start the narrative not on September 11 but earlier by way of deciphering the very conditions that produced terrorism in the first place? Or what if we were “to narrate ourselves not from the first person alone, but from, say, the position of the third, to receive an account delivered in the second” (8)? And she adds in a hopeful manner that such an attempt of inhabiting the decentered position of vulnerability might even prompt the nation to “endeavor to produce another public culture and policy in which suffering unexpected violence and reactive aggression are not accepted as the norms of political life” (xii). Prompted by Butler’s concern with the ethics and politics of the narrative framing of trauma, this essay reflects on one prominent narrative strategy emerging in US literature in the wake of September 11, namely the reading of the current trauma through the lens of a previous one—a strategy that I will refer to as trauma transfer. Frequently the Holocaust serves as such a point of reference as, for instance, in Israel Horovitz’s play Three Days After Paradise (2001) or Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). In Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, it is primarily the firebombing of Dresden and the nuclear [End Page 454] destruction of Hiroshima that are evoked to deal with the attacks on New York. Yet, by sketching out the larger semantic field of World War II atrocities, Foer also conjures up what many perceive to be...

Why narrative frames matter for instructional videos: A value-evoking narrative frame is essential to foster sustained learning with emotional design videos

Reviews 257 who also settled a Jewish community there around 1790. In 1832 Abdelkader chose Mascara as his headquarters. In 1835, the town was reduced to ruins by the French. Control of the town was contested until 1841.Abdelkader, continuously embroiled in military maneuvers, was finally captured and taken to France. For most of the novel he remains imprisoned.Yudah, the chosen one, is led across the desert to Abdelkader’s encampment only to find he is away at war. His defeated followers are later shipped to the island Sainte Marguerite in the Mediterranean. In Abdelkader’s absence, his wives ignore Yudah. Her arrival, unexpected and inopportune, leaves her in isolation, spending her time in long meditative walks. Nostalgia for the desert and wisdom of her people’s ways accompany her. Expelled from the island to France, she continues her quest to find the Emir, to fulfill the mission and expectations entrusted to her. The theme of rapprochement permeates the novel. Symbolic is Yudah’s ride on the donkey: straddling two worlds she makes her way alone, guided by inner resource. Passing from continent to continent, different languages, religions, cultures, all confront and challenge her. Unaided, her life is an apprenticeship in solitude and misfortune. Her unique appearance, demeanor, and a chance occurrence cause her to be absorbed into a troupe of traveling actors who assign to her the role of Racine’s Esther.Commissioned as the troupe’s representative to solicit assistance from Victor Hugo, she serves as messenger between the great writer and her theatrical director. At the time, Paris was a city in turmoil; around 1848, the swing from monarchy to Second Republic was followed by bloody uprisings. The streets of Paris a battleground,Yudah discovers she must navigate barricades to deliver messages. The author weaves the themes of war, exile, and the reconciliation of two worlds into the life of a female whose bitter struggle to fulfill her destiny is borne with gracious acceptance. Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese writer who has lived in Paris since 1972. Her understanding of North Africa and her affinity for merging history and fiction make the novel engaging reading. Neumann University (PA) Maria G. Traub Labro, Philippe. Le flûtiste invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-0140534 . Pp. 177. 17,50 a. A frame narrator finds a manuscript and quotes it in full, or retells at length one or more stories that he or she has heard. The device pretends that the frame narration is true but not necessarily the embedded stories. Barbey d’Aurevilly and Maupassant used this popular nineteenth-century literature technique, as did Conrad, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë, among others. Contemporary writers may also use it, but here it feels pleasantly antiquated, partly because of the formal language of the frame narrator who, like Labro himself, is a radio and television personality as well as a writer. Like Labro’s most successful books, L’étudiant étranger and Le petit garçon, this one falls between autobiography and fiction. Labro even quotes from Hemingway’s preface to A Moveable Feast: “Ce livre peut être tenu pour une œuvre d’imagination” (14). As Labro says in an interview, “la mémoire transforme toute réalité.” Here the embedded tales are transformed by the memories of both the original and the frame narrators.A French exchange student is obsessed with a rich American nymphomaniac he meets on the Queen Mary; a sharpshooter with the OAS in Algeria does not assassinate the frame narrator when he could; a Jewish boy avoids Auschwitz and as a young man escapes from Hungary. The first story begins rather like Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”when a grizzled man stops the frame narrator and insists on telling him the story of his transatlantic voyage, which, as his listener says, sounds more like “fantasme” (41) than reality. We are further invited to doubt because, years later, a key detail turns out to be wrong. In the second tale, the frame narrator wonders if Rick, the self-described former sniper, is a “mythomane” (134). Nevertheless, the events Rick recounts correspond to the narrator’s memories of his own...

Desire in Canterbury Tales by Elizabeth Scala. The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Elizabeth Scala's most recent monograph, Desire in Canterbury Tales, reads Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as discourse of desire. She argues that this discourse is not only rooted in topics chosen by individual pilgrims in frame narrative, but can also, more significantly, be found in various acts of misreading occurring in frame narrative that produce compulsive desires and that can in turn be traced in of and in signifying chains connecting tales. The frame narrative, Scala argues, is where Chaucer sets up pretended among pilgrims, a unity that then gets tested and discomfited (2-4) and results in competitive fictions that are often linked to misrecognitions and misreadings of tale tellers. Scala's work, as whole, contributes structural reading of tales to ongoing debates in Chaucer studies. But her monograph also productively intervenes in current criticism by linking her structural analysis of Chaucer's to psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. Scala argues that conscious means by which speakers pursue various desires and goals are linked to structure of unconscious assumed with language (11). Psychoanalytic theories help her to explain the subjects position within complex and socially structured world of symbolization, Symbolic order (11). Scala's readings are therefore heavily influenced by Saussure's structural linguistics regarding signifier in (the 'audible image' of sign), which Lacanian theories separate from mental concepts signifier inspires. Lacans essay on Mirror Stage is referenced more particularly to point to imaginary identifications and gestures of communication which arise from mistaking other subjects as our selves (24). Her individual chapters trace these structural and psychoanalytical theories in frame narratives and tales of Fragment I, as well as in marriage group and religious stories of Canterbury Tales. Her analyses therefore also consider how might be linked to gender and sexuality, as well as to religion. She moreover frames her argument by considering other voices in Chaucer studies (including debates by New Critics and Historicists) and, more specifically, questions these schools of thought leave unanswered about language, selfhood, and expressions of desires in medieval texts (15-20). Her introductory chapter, Mobility and Contestation, describes her overarching argument for book, and frames by setting up her critical apparatus and her definition of Chaucer's discourse of desire. She begins her analysis of primary source by quoting first eighteen lines of General Prologue and pointing to function of desire in his poetry. Verbs like longen and seken, framed by artifice of nature (rains, warming winds, and budding stems) and birds that mimic human lovesickness, are examples Scala draws on to explain juxtaposition between sexualized and its buildup from gentle awakening to being violently erotic and penetrative (5-6). This analysis sets stage for reading burgeoning desires and misrecognitions in frame narrative and in tales of, specifically, Fragment I. Scala's first chapter, 'We Witen Nat What Thing We Preyen Heere': Desire, Knowledge, and Ruse of Satisfaction in Tale, comments not only on frustrated desires of characters in Knight's Tale, but also references Chaucer's act of appropriating source material and reappropriating his own previously penned Palamon and Arcite into Canterbury Tales. This act of suturing another story into Canterbury Tales not only [alters] romance he formerly wrote but also [crafts] particularized response and aggressive reading of it (84). …

Reviewed by: From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán Joyce Tolliver Susan Walter . From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010. 177 pgs. Susan Walter's monograph is one of three recent volumes by U.S. Hispanists dedicated to the study of the short fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán, appearing a year after Susan McKenna's Crafting the Female Subject: Narrative Innovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), and in the same year as Linda M. Willem's edition, "Náufragas" y otros cuentos (European Masterpieces, 2010)—volumes that themselves were published in the wake of this past decade's marked increase in close readings of Pardo Bazán's short fiction with a focus on the intersection of gender and narrative voice. Walter's study thus forms a notable contribution to this critical "boom"—a very welcome turn in Hispanic studies that recognizes not only the importance of the 600-some texts that comprise Pardo Bazán's short story production, but also the significance and value of the genre itself. In From the Outside Looking In..., Walter examines a group of thirteen stories featuring framed narratives, categorizing them according to the genders of the protagonist and of the narrators. Her interest in examining these texts is double. Within an explicitly structuralist paradigm, she wants to answer Todorov's question, posed in The Poetics of Prose (Cornell, 1977), about what it is that narrative frames add to a narrative—or, more specifically, what the function of narrative frames is in these thirteen texts. Like McKenna, she explains how the framing structure of these stories often requires that the reader participate more actively in interpreting the events told. In terms of the representation of women's experience, Walter's claim is that the stories she studies tend to present "objectified images" (88) of women and their experiences when the narrative frame features a male narrator speaking in the first person about the experiences of a female character (as occurs in "Afra," "Madre," "Los ramilletes," "Sor Aparición," and "Los buenos tiempos"); and that the handful of Pardo Bazan's stories that feature female narrators telling their own stories "give the reader insight into the feelings and motivations of the female protagonists (57)." She specifies that, in the four stories studied in this category ("Champagne," "Paria," "El encaje roto," and "El revolver"), "this is achieved by giving a voice to these female protagonists so that they can narrate their own stories, from their very personal perspectives" (57). Finally, Walter examines four stories in which a male narrator represents the experiences of a male character, and concludes that each of these stories ("Banquete de boda," "Remordimiento," "Delincuente honrado, and "Feminista") "all succeed in questioning the traditional patriarchal social norms" even though there is no overt criticism of the characters' gender ideology (127). In keeping with previous critical studies of Pardo Bazán's stories, Walter draws on the work not only of the early structuralist narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Gerald Prince, but also on theories of feminist narratologists Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, referring regularly to Lanser's distinction between "public" and "private" narration. She also comments on the representation, in the stories, of public and private physical spaces, although she does not explore the potential relationship between the representation of public and private physical spaces and the "public" or "private" nature of the narrative voices in these same texts. [End Page 120] In each of the three chapters, Walter studies some stories that have already received critical attention in the U.S., and others that have escaped our attention. The studies presented here of "Afra," "El encaje roto," "Champagne," "Sor Aparición" and "Feminista" may seem familiar to those who have read analyses of these stories by other scholars. Many readers who have read the stories examined in this volume may take issue, on the other hand, with some of Walters' interpretative postulations—for example her claim that the...

In order to explore student learning experiences in English language classes, this study employed a qualitative data collection method known as narrative frames, which uses prompts to stimulate written expression of ideas. Data were collected through narrative frames on three different occasions from 36 second-year high school students in a team-taught EFL classroom in Japan, in both English and Japanese. After collecting the frames, individual interviews were conducted with two students from the class and their team teachers to further enquire about their experience, particularly with regard to the use of narrative frames. Findings suggest that the narrative frame technique proved to be a beneficial tool for improving learner autonomy. It facilitated the students becoming responsible for their learning in general, and encouraged them to become more serious about their learning of the English language. Methodological implications for the future use of narrative frames are provided.

The European Union (EU) has been struggling to find a shared course on African migration since the entry into force of the Schengen Agreement (1995). It has done so through two interrelated processes of negotiation. Firstly, parties have negotiated narrative frames about migration and, in particular, whether migration should be interpreted in terms of security or in terms of development. Secondly, they have negotiated internal and external migration policies , that is, how migration should be managed respectively inside the EU (based on cooperation between EU member states) and outside it (based on cooperation with third states). In times in which narrative frames increasingly shape policy negotiations, it becomes very important to analyse how policymakers negotiate narrative frames on migration and how these shape policy responses. However, such an analysis is still missing. This discussion paper investigates how European states and institutions have negotiated the relation between EU borders and African mobility between 1999 and the beginning of 2019. It focusses in particular on how the process of negotiation of migration policies has been interrelated with a process of negotiation of narrative frames on migration. It does so based on an analysis of EU policy documents from 1999 to 2019 and on interviews with representatives of European and African states and regional organisations. Two major trends have characterised related EU negotiation processes: migration-security narrative frames have strengthened national-oriented and solid borders-oriented approaches (and vice versa), and migration-development narrative frames have strengthened transnational-oriented and liquid borders-oriented approaches (and vice versa). Since 1999, the European Council has mostly represented security- and national-oriented approaches, and the European Commission has mostly represented development- and transnational-oriented approaches. The two competing approaches have always been interlinked and influenced each other. However, in the last years, security-oriented national and solid border approaches have gained prominence over development-oriented transnational and liquid border approaches. In particular, the Commission has progressively mainstreamed national objectives in its transnational actions and security concerns in its development measures. Prioritising security over transnational development has augmented inequalities, in particular at the expenses of actors with scarce political representation in Africa and the EU. Such inequalities include increasing migrant selectivity and wage dumping.

Over the past few decades, the fandom of Jane Austen has become a transmedia fandom. As a consequence, Jane Austen fan fiction may not just be based on the novels, but also on adaptations and other texts. I examine what this means for the fictional worlds which are represented in Jane Austen fan fiction, and the texts through which these worlds are evoked and experienced. More specifically, I examine how Vicky’s ‘All in a Name’ and Wendi’s ‘A Lesson Hard Learned’ use the resources at their disposal to invite emotional responses. To get a grip on the high ‘angst’ rating of these stories, I turn to narrative theories on ‘storyworlds,’ and particularly on emotional immersion. Marie-Laure Ryan and Marco Caracciolo have posited that texts can invite readers to have a particular experience. Catherine Emmott has added that readers use mental representations of fictional situations, or ‘contextual frames,’ to understand stretches of narrative text. I claim that readers of fan fiction also rely on mental representations of the fic’s source world, which I call ‘narrative frames.’ In the case of Pride and Prejudice, this world is a transmedial world, because fans often base their mental representations on more than Austen’s novel alone. A comparative analysis of ‘All in a Name’ and ‘A Lesson Hard Learned,’ in which the ‘narrative frame’ concept is used as a heuristic tool, reveals that these fics use textual strategies to set up a contrast between the reader’s narrative frames and the events of the fic. This, together with ‘angst-y’ story content, invites readers to feel a sense of anxiety, apprehension, and loss. This storytelling practice is rooted in a highly specific discourse, or system of knowledge and evaluation, which is constantly being defined and redefined by the Austen fandom.

According to Gérard Genette, frame narratives are one of few reliable textual markers of fictionality. While very different from the corpus studied by Genette, al-Tanūkhī’s (d. 384/994) compilation al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda includes many anecdotes featuring at least one instance of narrative framing, as well as many more anecdotes told on a single narrative level (after the usual introductory chain of transmitters). As such, the compilation presents a good case study for the link between fictionality and narrative levels in a premodern Arabic context. On the strength of many examples drawn from the compilation, this article describes three uses of frame narratives in the Faraj and argues that even if some of the compiled material thematizes questions of reports’ plausibility (rather than “fictionality”), narrative levels are not a reliable marker of stories considered to be more implausible. One use of the frame narrative in the Faraj is indeed in addressing a report’s plausibility (1), but other anecdotes achieve this without any such framing. Moreover, frame narratives also take on other functions whereby they neither flag nor are reliably associated with a story’s lesser plausibility. Such functions include anchoring a story’s narration within a familiar situation and highlighting the message of a narrative by setting up parallels between its different levels (2). Another function is to negotiate the incorporation of less familiar voices and content, remote in social milieu or geography from al-Tanūkhī’s life, into the world of the compilation (3). These different uses show that frame narratives are not reliable markers of fictionality in the Faraj, and that they were not artificially affixed onto the Faraj’s less plausible plots. Instead, they served different functions, introducing a wide variety of content and shaping the reception of stories by questioning their plausibility, yes, but also by exploiting and manipulating readers’ expectations, and by pushing the limits of spaces and perspectives incorporated into the Faraj’s overall message of deliverance after hardship. Key words: Frame narratives, fictionality, plausibility, foreignness, al-Tanūkhī, al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda, compilation, Abbasid literature.