The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize

In 1994, acting on the suggestion of its President, Janice Carlisle, The International Society for the Study of Narrative established an award that "honors the many past and continuing contributions of Barbara Perkins and George Perkins to the development and success of the Society, including the founding of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The award, presented annually to the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative," offers a prize of $1000 plus a contribution of $400 toward expenses for the winning author to attend the Narrative Conference where the award will be presented. The first Perkins Award was announced at the MLA meeting in Chicago in December, 1995, and presented at the Tenth Anniversary Conference at Ohio State University in April 1996.

The latest call for nominations can be found at our blog:

Call for Nominations: Perkins Prize

Publisher, third party, and self-nominations are appropriate. Nominations should be submitted as soon as possible. The committee begins its deliberations in the spring; nominations received after June 1 will be at a disadvantage.

The winner will announced at the MLA Convention in December, and the prize presented at the annual Narrative Conference the following spring. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, consists of $1,000 plus a contribution of $400 toward expenses for the winning author to attend the Narrative Conference where the award will be presented.

Past Prize Winners

Honorable Mention

A.C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity (Oxford, 2005)

2006

Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Duke University Press, 2004)

Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)

2005

Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (University Press of Virginia, 2003)

2004

David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)

Jorgen Dines Johansen, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002)

2003

Amy Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)

Michael Whitmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford University Press, 2001)

2002

Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Honorable Mention

Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)

2001

Robert L.Caserio, The Novel in England, 1900-1950: History and Theory (Twayne Publishers, 1999)

Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

2000

Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)

Dorothy J. Hale, Social formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford University Press, 1998)

Honorable Mentions

Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1998)

Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)

Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998

1999

Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)

1998

Judith Roof, Come As You Are (Columbia University Press, 1996)

Monika Fludernik, Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (Routledge, 1996)

1997

Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Harvard University Press, 1995)

1996

Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994)