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The aim of this paper is to analyse the postmodern picturebook Princess Smartypants, written and illustrated by Babette Cole, taking into account the relationship between the words and the images and the incongruities posed not only between the text and the images but also between this tale and other fairytales. Generic conventions, background knowledge and intertextuality are key aspects to identify and/or to solve the incongruities, which provoke irony and humor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative innovations in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, particularly its unique treatment of time and character, are addressed in this study. The narrative investigation serves as a basis for the paper to suggest a new way to read the novel, as a "fictional ethnography". This type of reading shows how the narrative strategy in the novel comments on American Indian history of the twentieth century. In this way the novel shows how narrative devices can be a part of a social and political debate in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retrospection, first-person narration and a confessional mode are hallmarks of Graham Swift's fiction. The first-person narratives in Waterland and Tomorrow are constructed as forms of oral communication, even if they are narrated primarily or exclusively by the narrators to themselves. Yet each narrator invokes or conjures up a listener for whose sake the story-telling is undertaken, and, consequently, the stories have characteristics of oral deliverance. While Swift's characters believe in the importance of narration and confession as a form of self-understanding, they also intuit the necessity of having an audience. Hence, their interior monologues are carried out as if they were part of dialogues, addressed to listeners whose imagined presence and response shape the structure and content of the narrative. This paper examines the function of non-listening listeners in Swift's selected novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

M. G. Vassanji's novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is presented as an autobiographical narrative recorded by Vikram Lall, a fictional Kenyan Indian, whose life runs parallel with the history of his native country through the second half of the twentieth century. As the eponymous hero confesses in the opening lines of the story: "[He has] the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning." Using the framework established by Philippe Lejeune in Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), this roguish life appears as a rogue autobiography as well since it "cheats" with the characteristics of the genre. The paper will attempt to show how the novel operates within such a framework and how the usual code is used or misused in the interest of suspense and satire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]