Narrative Theory
A Critical Introduction

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: story/discourse
2. Action, event, conflict: the uses of narrative in Aristotle and Hegel
2.1. Beginning, middle, and end: Aristotle and narrative
2.2. Tragedy, comedy, and the cunning of reason: Hegel and narrative theory
3. Lost illusions: narrative in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud
3.1. First as tragedy: Karl Marx, narrative, and revolution
3.2. Beyond story and discourse: Friedrich Nietzsche and the limits of narrative
3.3. Narrative and its discontents: Sigmund Freud's story
4. Epic, novel, narrative theory
4.1. Relations stop nowhere: Henry James and the novel's narrative
4.2. Starry maps: Georg Lukács and the comparative analysis of narrative genres
4.3. To kill is not to refute: Mikhail Bakhtin on genre, narrative, and history
4.4. History's scar: Erich Auerbach and narrative thinking
5. Form, structure, narrative
5.1. The hero leaves home: Vladimir Propp and narrative morphology
5.2. Knight's move: Viktor Shklovsky and Russian Formalism
5.3. Differences without positive terms: Ferdinand de Saussure and the Structuralist turn
5.4. The elementary structures of story and discourse: Claude Lévi-Strauss and the narrative analysis of myth
6. Narratology and narrative theory: Kristeva, Barthes, and Genette
6.1. It is what it isn't: Julia Kristeva and Tel Quel
6.2. Parisian gold: Roland Barthes and narrative pleasure
6.3. The knowable is at the heart of the mysterious: Genette's narrative poetics.

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• Table of Contents (41 KB)
• Marketing Excerpt (111 KB)
• Index (121 KB)
• Copyright Information Page (85 KB)
• Front Matter (130 KB)