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This text helps readers understand what narrative is, how it is constructed, how it is transmitted, and how it changes when the medium or the cultural context change. It is a key resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, and autobiography.
List of contents
1. Narrative and life; 2. Defining narrative; 3. The borders of narrative; 4. The rhetoric of narrative; 5. Closure; 6. Narration; 7. Interpreting narrative; 8. Three ways to interpret narrative; 9. Adaptation across media; 10. Character and Self in narrative; 11. Narrative and truth; 12. Narrative worlds; 13. Narrative contestation; 14. Narrative negotiation: conflict revisited; 15. Narrative negotiation: closure revisited.
About the author
A specialist in narrative, autobiography, modernism, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, H. Porter Abbott is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of narrative and the work of Samuel Beckett. He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1966 to 2005, with stints as Chair of English and Acting Dean of Arts and Humanities, and continues as Research Professor Emeritus.
Summary
This text helps readers understand what narrative is, how it is constructed, how it is transmitted, and how it changes when the medium or the cultural context change. It is a key resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, and autobiography.
Additional text
Praise for the first edition: 'A lucid, practical, wide-ranging, and often original introduction to narrative, which will be extremely useful in undergraduate and graduate courses on literary theory and criticism. This is not a dry textbook, however; the reader is made aware of a real voice and of a fascination with the role of narrative across many areas of culture and beyond.' Derek Attridge, University of York
