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Introduction
In a 2001 article written on the role of narration in postmodern drama, Brian Richardson contends that "[n]arrative and performance are two of the most widespread and best appreciated cultural forms in our time now, both seem to be everywhere. It is only appropriate that the site in which they are fused together is given the attention it deserves" ("Voice and Narration" 690). He then adds: "Narration has long been a basic feature of the twentieth-century stage, and one that ought to be more fully appreciated and extensively theorized" (691). There has been as unprecedented burgeoning of narrative-driven or fully monological plays worldwide in the last two-three decades. As a result, the interface of narration and drama has come under scrutiny by critics. In "Drama and Narrative," an extended entry in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory (2005), Roy Sommer emphasizes that "there is a large number of narrative strategies that are frequently used in dramatic texts," including "verbal descriptions of offstage action, the play within the play, mise-en-abyme, narratives embedded within dramatic action, ... all kinds of metanarrative comments, stage directions, choric figures, and narrating characters" (121). Later, he summarizes that "[b]esides its four primary functions (i.e., exposition, suggestion, compression and address), narrative adds to the playwright's creative tools, facilitates interdiscursive experimentation, and encourages self-reflexivity by the disruption of dramatic action" (123). After these antecedents it is hardly surprising that The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (2007) includes a chapter entided "Drama and Narrative," again by Richardson, who mentions the form of "monodrama" as a further example of how the act of narration has developed a shaping influence on the genre itself. In addition, the author devotes particular attention to the concept of the "generative narrator" and its types, distinguished according to whether the character taking the narrator's position is a participant in the story or not (Richardson, "Drama and Narrative" 151, 152). The theorization of how narrative works in drama often proves challenging because drama's boundaries have become rather fluid due to the fertilizing presence of the variety of transgeneric and transmedial phenomena and methods increasingly characteristic of cultural production in the postmodern era. Hans-Thies Lehmann's claim that "[t]he principle of narration is an essential trait of postdramatic theatre" (109) may be read...