Narrative Manipulations of Time Travel: Character Knowledge and Temporal Disruption in Fiction and Film

This thesis explores the way time travel narratives experiment with story structure to convey the estrangement of travelling in time. It considers the relationship of character and audience knowledge and its role in comprehension in a range of film, television, and literary texts across a variety of genres. It concludes that time travel narratives function as a form of covert metafiction, in their blending of history and fiction, their use of popular culture and intertextual references, and the way a time travelling character’s awareness of the order of events leads an audience to question the structure of the narrative itself.