The Nature of Narrative

Book excerpt: For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been an essential work for students of literature, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg offered a compelling history of narrative from antiquity to the twentieth century. Their main goal was to describe and analyze the nature of narrative's key elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. The Fortieth Anniversary Edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter by James Phelan on developments in narrative theory since 1966. This new material describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on character, plot, and narrative discourse. A continued leader in the field of narrative studies, The Nature of Narrative offers unique and invaluable histories of both narrative and narrative theory.