Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction provides detailed summaries of the chapters that comprise the volume, and, before that, the Introduction discusses the teaching of narrative at university in terms of curricular stages, notions of enchantment and disenchantment, realism and modernism and, drawing on (among others) D. A. Miller and Peter Brooks, relations in narrative between closure and the narratable, and Freud’s Eros and Thanatos. The latter provides an opportunity to develop some ideas about how teaching, narrative and desire connect. There is detailed discussion of how students respond to the experience of reading narrative fiction (as opposed to reading poetry and watching drama) and of working with ‘conflicted’ nineteenth-century novels.