Biography

Monika Fludernik is Professor emerita in English Literature at the University of Freiburg. She studied in Graz with F. K. Stanzel, writing a thesis on narrative and dialogue in James Joyce's Ulysses. She then moved to Vienna for her postdoctoral phase and habilitated in 1992. She is the author of, among others, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (Routledge, 1993), the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (Routledge, 1996), Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Developments in Narrative Structure: From the Thirteenth Century to the Rise of the Novel (Routledge, 2025). She has (co-)edited over thirty volumes of essays and special issues. In 2024, Fludernik was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea and the American Philosophical Society.

Project Abstract

The Present Tense in Pre-Modern English Narrative: Temporality and Textual Contouring in late Middle English and Early Modern English Storytelling

Previous analyses of the historical present tense have concentrated on its use in Antiquity, in historical texts, oral storytelling and in English literature from Dickens to postmodernism. However, there are numerous factual and fictional narratives before 1800 that deploy present-tense verbs in a variety of contexts and with a diversity of purposes, which do not neatly fit into the models proposed for the explanation of the historical present tense. On the basis of the corpus used for "Diachronic Narratology", these instances will be analyzed in relation to issues of temporality and textual contouring (fore- and backgrounding).

Selected Publications

2023. "Free Indirect Discourse in English: 1200-1700." In Handbook of Diachronic Narratology (Narratologia, 86), edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, 204-229. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-013.

2012."Narratology and Literary Linguistics." In The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, edited by Robert I. Binnick, 75-101. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195381979.013.0002.

2003. "Chronology, Time, Tense and Experientiality in Narrative" Language and Literature 12(2): 117-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947003012002295.

1992. "The Historical Present Tense in English Literature: An Oral Pattern and its Literary Adaptation." Language and Literature 17 (Crosscurrents of Influence special issue 1992): 77-107.

(published at Trinity University, English Deptm., San Antonio TX 78212-7200)

1991. "The Historical Present Tense Yet Again: Tense Switching and Narrative Dynamics in Oral and Quasi-Oral Storytelling." Text & Talk 11 (3): 365-398. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.1.1991.11.3.365.