The Nature of Narrative: Revised and Expanded

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Oxford University Press, USA, Sep 25, 2006 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 388 pages
For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts. The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on plot, character, 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.
 

Contents

IV
3
V
17
VI
57
VII
82
VIII
160
IX
207
X
240
XI
283
XII
337
XIII
355
XIV
373
XV
379
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About the author (2006)

Robert Scholes is Research Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He is the author of many books of literary theory. James Phelan is an Australian writer, born in Melbourne, Australia in 1979. He studied architecture at RMIT, received his MA at the University of Melbourne in Creative Writing, and earned his PhD in Young Adult Literature at Swinburne University of Technology. He writes thrillers and young adult post-apocalyptic novels. His series include The Jed Walker series, The Last Thirteen series, The Lachlan Fox series, and The Alone series. He wrote a book of nonfiction entitled Literati.

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