Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland) and Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland research consortium "Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory" (2018-2023). Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford, 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014), and she has co-edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020, with Colin Davis) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018), Memory Studies special issue "Cultural Memorial Forms" (2021, with Eneken Laanes), and Poetics Today special issue "Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom" (2022, with Maria Mäkelä).

Mark Freeman is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the

Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of numerous works, including Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (1993); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford, 2010); The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self (Oxford, 2014); and, most recently, Do I Look at You with Love? Reimagining the Story of Dementia (2021). Winner of the Theodore R. Sarbin Award from the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation, Freeman is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and serves as Editor for the Oxford University Press series "Explorations in Narrative Psychology."

• Introduction: Challenges and Prospects of Narrative Hermeneutics in Tumultuous Times


• Hanna Meretoja and Mark Freeman


• Part I: Politics of Storytelling


• Chapter 1: The Inevitability, and Danger, of Narrative


• Mark Freeman


• Chapter 2: Testimony: Truth, Lies, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion


• Colin Davis


• Chapter 3: Hermeneutic Awareness in Uncertain Times: Post-truth, Narrative Agency, and Existential Diminishment


• Hanna Meretoja


• Part II: Understanding the Self


• Chapter 4: Verstehen and narrative


• Jens Brockmeier


• Chapter 5: "Be Loyal to the Story": Sorrow, Narrative, and Truth-telling


• Molly Andrews


• Chapter 6: Narrative as an Interpretation of Self-Pattern


• Shaun Gallagher


• Chapter 7: Speaking of Elves, Dragons, and Werewolves: Narrative Hermeneutics and Other-than-Human Identities


• Clive Baldwin, Lauren Ripley, and Shania Arsenault


• Part III: Understanding the Other


• Chapter 8: Identity, Understanding, and Narrative


• Georgia Warnke


• Chapter 9: Found in Translation: Solicitude and Linguistic Hospitality in Storytelling


• Andreea Deciu Ritivoi


• Chapter 10: The Hermeneutics of Darkness: Interpreting Perpetrators on their Crimes


• Brian Schiff, Kaylee Altimore, and Genevieve Bougher


• Chapter 11: Perpetrator Histories, Silencing and Untold Stories: A View from Contemporary Psychoanalysis


• Roger Frie


• Part IV: Narrative Practices


• Chapter 12: Literary and Film Narratives


• Jakob Lothe


• Chapter 13: Queer Perspectives on Narrative Practices in Asylum Politics


• Ada Schwanck


• Chapter 14: Narrative Medicine: The Book at the Gates of Biomedicine


• Danielle Spencer


• Chapter 15: Psychiatric Truth and Narrative Hermeneutics


• Bradley Lewis


• Index