Narrating Complexity

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media.
The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.


Richard Walsh is a member of the Dept. of English and Related Literature in the University of York. He teaches modules in American literature and in theories of story, covering fiction and non-fiction, the earliest years of cinema, and graphic novels, as well as narratives in digital and interactive media. Susan Stepney is a professor of Computer Science in the University of York. Her main area of interest is non-standard computation, in particular bioinspired algorithms, complex adaptive systems, emergent properties, and nanite assemblers.