The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize

Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, provides $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward the winning author’s expenses for attending the Narrative Conference at which the award will be presented.

The Perkins Prize is awarded to the most significant contribution to the study of narrative within a given year. It is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. All books on the topic of narrative, whether monographs, edited collections, or collaboratively written books, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators.

2025 Perkins Prize Winner

Katherine D. Johnston, Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature

Katherine D. Johnston’s Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature (U of Iowa P, 2023) opens with the simple claim that data surveillance is an “increasingly dominant technology of narration and characterization in twenty-first-century society” (2). From here, Johnston pushes our understanding of narrative in the current moment in two provocative directions. First, she uses tools of narrative analysis to grapple with the role that Big Data plays in our lives. Likening algorithmic data profiling to character development, surveillance with point of view, and data points as plot points in tales of the political economy, Johnston makes the persuasive case that narrative and Big Data are intimately intertwined, such that “Big Data has a narrative dimension” (26). Accordingly, she writes, literary criticism—and narrative studies in particular—is essential to answering questions about the authorship, narration, and reception of algorithmic profiles and plotlines.

Second, she turns to contemporary literature to illuminate what algorithms “cannot or do not” account for. In detailed close readings of novels and poetry, including work by Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson, Johnston tracks how each text “carries a set of affordances that constructively re-pace and respace our encounters with data surveillance” (3). Her analysis of this work runs the gamut of narratological topics, from omniscience and pacing to the second-person address and the fictionality of self-help books. Especially potent is the book’s conclusion, which traces not only the influence of data aggregation on the contemporary publishing industry via the resurgence of genre fiction as driven by Amazon’s increasingly specialized and individualized recommendations to readers, but also the influence of Big Data on the very process of reading itself, as Alexa, Goodreads, and Kindle transform an “otherwise intimate activit[y] into fungible figures that can be used to nudge consumer behavior” (146).

Johnston’s book is a testament to the power of narrative. It both locates narrative in surprising places to showcase its foundational importance in our lives and looks to narratives to expose what might otherwise remain in the blind spots of technology. That she manages to achieve this in lively and accessible prose is testament to her own narrative prowess.

Past Prize Winners

2024

Marco Caracciolo, Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022)

Honorable Mention: Peter Friederici, Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope (MIT Press, 2022)

2023

Carolin Gebauer, Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021)

2022

Natalya Bekhta We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020)

2021

Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (New York: NYU Press, 2019)

2020

Ruth Page, Narratives Online: Shared Stories on Social Media (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018

2019

Rita Charon et al., The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Honorable Mention: Christopher González, Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2017).

2018

Kent Puckett, Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2016).

2017

Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

Honorable Mention: Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds.), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015).

2016

Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P 2014).

Honorable Mention: Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (2014).

2015

Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago, The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2013)

Honorable Mention: Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (de Gruyter, 2013)

2014

Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2012).

2013

Edward Adams, Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (Charlotte, VA: U of Virginia P, 2011).

Honorable Mention: Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011)

2012

Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010).

Honorable Mention: Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010).

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)