Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

Introduction: What lies ahead -- Part 1: Surprise and the theory of narrative. A flow of unforeseeable novelty ; Narratological approaches to the unforeseeable. -- Part 2: The unpredictable and the future anterior. Prediction and the age of the unknowable ; What will have happened: writing and the future perfect ; The untimely and the messianic. -- Part 3 :Time flow and the process of reading. Narrative modality: Possibility, probability and the passage of time ; Temporal perspective: narrative futurity and the distribution of knowledge. -- Part 4: The unforeseeable in fictional form. Maximum peripeteia: reversal of fortune and the rhetoric of temporal doubling ; Freedom and the inescapable future ; The philosophy of grammar.

Focusing on surprise, spontaneous eruption and the unforeseeable, The Unexpected argues that stories help us to reconcile what we expect with what we experience. Though narrative is often understood a recapitulation of past events, the book argues that the unexpected and the future anterior, a future that is already complete, are guiding ideas for new understandings of the reading process. It also points beyond that to some of the key temporal concepts of our epoch, of unpredictability, the event, the untimely and the messianic.