Vicious Circles: Circular Fiction and Time Loop Narratives

Abstract Time loop narratives raise a number of interesting questions for narrative theory. There is the curious temporality of a work in which past, present, and future are rearranged. There is also the question of how such narratives progress, given that they are composed of repeated events that must be sequenced and developed, and provided with an ending that should satisfactorily conclude such works. The status of characters in these works also needs to be explored; they can (and sometimes do) encounter their “other” selves in the storyworld. Observations on the ontological status of the fictional world of such narratives and comments on the ways in which they are represented and misrepresented in literary criticism and narrative theory are also set forth.