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Jan Alber. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Frontiers of Narrative Series. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016, xi + 310 pp., $ 55.00.

Jan Alber both theorises and provides a historical survey of unnatural narratives, which he defines as narratives that represent “physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and events” (14). Unnatural Narrative establishes an inventory of unnatural elements in narrative, and it delineates the interpretive strategies readers use to make sense of them. The main goal of Alber’s book, to which both these aims are subordinate, is to rethink the nature of postmodernism and its relationship to what Alber calls “pre-postmodernist narratives” (5). In his own terms: “I aim to reconceptualize postmodernism as an intertextual endeavour that is connected to the history of literature through manifestations of the unnatural” (13). Postmodern narratives, Alber contends, draw upon unnatural elements that have already become conventionalised in the context of older genres. This is what places them in a relationship of continuity with earlier forms. On the other hand, they concentrate and radicalise those elements within contexts that are, on the whole, realistic, thereby generating defamiliarising, disorienting, and ultimately metafictional effects – this is what distinguishes postmodernism from prepostmodernism.