Editors' Note

Abstract

To the readers of StyleWe are pleased to announce that you hold in your hands our special issue of Style, volume 55, number 1 (2021), and guest edited by the distinguished Professor Dan Shen, of the University of Beijing [Peking University], PR China, Department of English. She has written a “Target Essay” or TE (included), titled “Covert Progression and Dual Narrative Dynamics” and, following a number of responses to it, has also written rejoinders to all contributors. Professor Shen's essay lays out some recent principles and consequences of the covert and dual conception of narrative dynamics she has been working on for a while (abstract below).We received the completed essay in early spring 2020, and subsequently mailed copies to a number of narrative scholars across the world, asking them to contribute a response of some 1,000 to 2,000 words to any element or section of the target essay (TE), offering their considered opinion and scholarly analysis of some or several of the ideas in it as a means of contributing to an on-going conversation about this narrative theory and/or practice in prose literature or in some other media.This issue, 55.1, is the seventh in our series of specials devoted to this type of format, one found in several of the life sciences. In Style, previous guest-edited issues have been similarly completed by several scholars: Joseph Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study” (42.2 & 3, 2008); Alan Palmer, “Social Minds in Criticism and Fiction” (45.2, 2011); Peter Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft, “Euclid at the Core: Re-centering Literary Education” (48.1, 2014); Brian Richardson, “Unnatural Narrative Theory” (50.4, 2016); James Phelan, “Authors, Resources, Audiences: Toward a Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative” (52.1 & 2, 2018); and Richard Walsh, “Fictionality as Rhetoric” (53.4, 2019).As with previous issues, the completed copy of Style will contain the aforementioned target essay, many 2,000-word responses from other scholars in the field, and Prof. Shen's rejoinder to each. Briefly, Prof. Shen tells us in her abstract that “Since Aristotle, investigations of narrative fiction have focused on the plot development and up to now, narrative theory is based only on this narrative movement. In order to uncover and to account for the ‘covert progression’ and its relation with the plot development, we need to break free of the bondage of the long critical tradition and to extend or transform the relevant theoretical concepts and models not only in narratology, but also in stylistics and translation studies.”We hope you will read the issue carefully and enjoy the debates ahead.