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This article furthers the somewhat underdeveloped area of research regarding the consideration of complex theoretical concepts such as postmodernism and metafiction in relation to children's literature by concentrating on a stunningly complex—although by no means rare—experimental text aimed at 8–12 year-olds. Using The Secret Series by Pseudonymous Bosch as example, I examine how children's literature can use such strategies to engage a child-reader and make them a tangible part of the construction of the novel. Drawing on elements of Text World Theory, diegetic narrative levels and the concept of the internal author, this study primarily explores the role of the interactive, visibly inventing, postmodern narrator, and, by extension, the dramatization of the reader as a part of the story. Framed against an academic background in which children's literature was deemed unworthy of study or outright dismissed, this article illustrates why children's literature is not only worthy of rigorous academic study in its own right but also that it often readily displays enough literary, linguistic, and narratological complexities to rival even the most sophisticated literature for adult readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to widespread assumptions, metaphor in narrative is not a pre-established, extra-textual form appearing in different instances of discourse, but rather an event resulting from a strategic distribution of information in the narrative process. Hence, the appeal to conceptual cultural knowledge is to be considered as a consequence, not as a prerequisite, of metaphor interpretation. By means of the concept of the paranarrative, we highlight the rhetorical interconnectedness of metaphor with other figures of speech (such as metonymy) and we explore the narrative integration of diacritic forms of indirectness. In order to illustrate the terminology that can address these focal concerns, the article discusses the relation between tropes and narrative, via selected examples from narrative texts (both fictional and non-fictional) written by Juli Zeh, Herta Müller, Jürgen Nieraad, and Siddhartha Mukherjee. As their common denominator, these examples channel through narrative figurative domains considered to be known intuitively, to wit: personifications; iconic pars pro toto references to concentration camps; and metaphors for cancer in disease biographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how narrative form and thematic content work in conjunction to encourage a reader's support for specific political, cultural and social views, using examples of metalepsis that mirror and support thematic socio-political stances in Russell Banks's fiction. Metalepsis (the crossing of a text's narrative levels) and plot themes of geographic and cultural boundary crossings play together in Banks's writing, which explores the permeability of divisions between African American and European American, the Caribbean and continental North America, male and female, and parent and child, consistently emphasizing issues surrounding national, cultural, gender and generational borders. Mirroring these more obvious sociological themes and arguments of his plots, Banks's structural border crossings force us to consider the permeability of conceptual boundaries between author and reader, reader and character, and narrator and narratee. Banks examines these boundaries' porosity -- on both levels -- by exploiting an increasingly common technique for shifting focalization in contemporary fiction -- episodic use of second-person narration. This metaleptic technique, crossing the borders of narrative levels, not only reflects, but inherently supports Banks's themes of geographic border crossings as a means of intercultural, interracial and interclass understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]