1st Edition

Contemporary Archival Fiction A Multimodal Cognitive Stylistic Approach

By Elin Ivansson Copyright 2026
244 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

244 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book presents a synthesised framework for analysing archival poetics in multimodal literature, examining case studies from twenty-first-century American fiction towards elucidating the archival turn in contemporary literature more broadly. Ivansson turns her focus on multimodal archival fiction, here understood as works which engage with archival practices of collecting and organising both... Read more

1 Introducing the Archival Turn: 1.1 Introduction, 1.2 History, Development, and Critique of the Archive, 1.3 Visual Art and the Archive, 1.4 Literature and the Archive, 1.5 Scope and Aims: The Need to Attend to Multimodal Archival Poetics, 1.6 Structure of the Book; 2 Towards a Methodology for Analysing Archival Fiction: 2.1 Introduction, 2.2 The Pictorial Turn, 2.3 The Multimodal Turn, 2.4 The Cognitive Turn, 2.5 Towards a Multimodal Cognitive Stylistics Approach to Archival Fiction; 3 Hippolyte’s Island: Ontological Ambiguity and the Book as an Archive: 3.1 Introduction, 3.2 Hippolyte’s Island, 3.3 Analysing Hippolyte’s Island as Archival Fiction, 3.4 Conclusion; 4 Important Artifacts: Piecing Together a True(ly) Archived Love Story: 4.1 Introduction, 4.2 Important Artifacts, 4.3 Analysing Important Artifacts as Archival Fiction, 4.4 Conclusion; 5 Lost Children Archive: Descending into an Inventory of Echoes: 5.1 Introduction, 5.2 Lost Children Archive, 5.3 Analysing Lost Children Archive as Archival Fiction, 5.4 Conclusion; 6 The Ice-bound Concordance: The Researcher Between Page and Screen: 6.1 Introduction, 6.2 The Ice-bound Concordance, 6.3 Analysing The Ice-bound Concordance as Archival Fiction, 6.4 Conclusion; 7 Conclusion: 7.1 Introduction, 7.2 Methodological Contributions, 7.3 Theoretical and Analytical Contributions, 7.4 Directions for Future Research, 7.5 Conclusion

Biography

Elin Ivansson is Associate Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, where she received her PhD in English in 2023.