Product Description
by James Phelan (Editor), Peter J. Rabinowitz (Editor)
The 35 original essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry.
- Comprises 35 original essays written by leading figures in the field
- Includes contributions from pioneers in the field such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller and Gerald Prince
- Represents all the major critical approaches to narrative and investigates and debates the relations between them
- Considers narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine
- Features analyses of a variety of media, including film, music, and painting
- Designed to be of interest to specialists, yet accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of the field
Back Jacket
The 35 original essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry. The essays represent all the major critical approaches to narrative - narratological, rhetorical, feminist, post-structuralist, historicist - and investigate and debate the relations among them. In addition, they stretch the boundaries of the field by considering narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine, and in a variety of media, including film, music, and painting.
The volume is divided into six parts: competing accounts of the history of the field; examinations of recurrent problems; suggestions for theoretical revisions and innovations; explorations of the relations among form, history, politics, and ethics; analyses of the way narrative operates in different disciplines and in media beyond the written word; and speculations about the future of narrative and of narrative theory. At the same time, it offers provocative analyses of a wide range of works, both canonical and popular, from the Bible through novels by Dickens, Woolf, and Arundhati Roy on to Bernard Herrmann's film music and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. Among its contributors are many of the leading figures in the field, including such early pioneers as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller, and Gerald Prince.
Author Biography
James Phelan is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the editor of the journal Narrative and the author of several books in narrative theory, the most recent of which are Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005) and Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007).
Peter J. Rabinowitz is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College. His previous publications include Before Reading (1987) and Authorizing Readers (coauthored with Michael Smith, 1998). He is also a music critic and serves as a contributing editor of Fanfare.
Phelan and Rabinowitz are coeditors of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, which now has more than twenty-five titles to its credit.
