Unlikely Storiesis the first book-length study of the full range of causal issues in narrative, and explores the neglected question of just what brings about events in a fictional text. This book focuses on causality as a foundational element of all narratives, and as a distinguishing feature of many of the most compelling works of distinctively modern fiction and drama. Richardson draws on a wide range of literary texts: seminal ancient and early modern works, the classics of high modernism, numerous avant garde and postmodern pieces, as well as narratives by recent postcolonial and U.S. Ethnic authors. This study brings together a number of related critical issues, including the causal laws that attempt to govern fictional worlds, the reader's implication in the causal dilemmas that confront major characters, and the philosophical and ideological ascriptions of cause that are variously embodied, interrogated, or parodied. One of the most significant features of this study is its disclosure of just how fundamental and widespread causal issues are in complex narratives--and how insistently they are thematized in twentieth-century works.

The first, theoretical section of the book explores several issues invariably present in the often curious intersections of philosophical and literary uses of causality, and engages in larger, ongoing debates involving deconstruction, feminism, and more traditional theories of narrative. It goes on to scrutinize claims about the nature of narrative, and outlines a theory of probability in fictional worlds that can both encompass traditional notions like fate and determinism as well as distinctive modern and postmodern uses of chance. The last half of the book identifies exemplary moments in modern deployments of causation present in Conrad's Nostromo, Faulkner's Light in August, and Ellison's Invisible Man, as the power of necessity is challenged by irruptions of chance and coincidence. This is followed by an account of Beckett's relentless interrogation of causality in Molloy>, perhaps the most farreaching such investigation in literature. Another chapter examines non-Western causal agencies, as Asian, postcolonial, and U.S. ethnic authors explore causal issues from quite different metaphysical vantage points. The final chapter provides an overview of contemporary practices, and identifies some distinctive postmodern strategies and potential limitations. Here the paradoxes of representing chance events in fictional discourse are outlined and discussed. This book also explores related questions of literary history and theory, ideological critique, and narrative sequencing.

"This is a book not so much about causality as about its infringements and displacements in modernist and postmodern narrative. Richardson gives us readings of a truly astounding range of novels, short stories and plays and explicates their structural and thematic preoccupations with causality, fate, chance and supernatural forces. Enjoyable, insightful and instructive: a book written with great tact and sophistication."
--Prof. Monika Fludernik,
University of Freiburg