About Author

Jan Alber is an assistant professor in the English Department of the University of Freiburg in Germany. He received a scholarship from the German Research Foundation that allowed him to spend the 2007–2008 academic year at Ohio State University as a visiting scholar doing research on his second book under the auspices of Project Narrative. Alber's new project focuses on unnatural elements in postmodernist narratives. He wrote articles on Beckett, Dickens, narratology, the prison experience, ideological underpinnings of prison narratives, cinematic prison metaphors, and impossible storyworlds that were published or are forthcoming in journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style. He edited two volumes, Moderne – Postmoderne (with Monika Fludernik, 2003) and Stones of Law - Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age (with Frank Lauterbach, forthcoming at the University of Toronto Press). Jan Alber also contributed to numerous edited collections as well as to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and the new Handbook of Narratology.