A Corpus Stylistics Approach to Contemporary Present-tense Narrative

Book excerpt: Focusing on the growing trend of employing the present tense in storytelling, this book explores present-tense narrative in contemporary fiction. Using a corpus approach, speech, writing, and thought presentation in 21st-century present-tense narrative is compared with 20th-century past-tense narrative. An in-depth comparative analysis reveals previously undiscovered innovative features specific to how character discourse is presented in modern narratives. Notably, narrative tenses have an impact on thought presentation; in present-tense narrative, Free Direct Thought (FDT) emerges as frequently as Free Indirect Thought (FIT), a departure from the dominance of FIT in modern past-tense narrative. This book will be of interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and those who have found themselves absorbed in a 21st-century work of present-tense fiction.