frontiers of narrative
Series Editor: David Herman,
North Carolina State University

No single period or society can do without narratives. And, a good number
of contemporary thinkers hasten to add, whatever you say and think
about a certain time or place becomes a narrative in its own right. From
the oldest myths and legends to postmodern fabulation, narration has
always been central. Postmodern philosophers may submit that there
are no longer any grand, encompassing narratives, but they also contend
that everything amounts to a narrative, including the world and the
self. If that is correct, then the study of narrative is not just a pastime
for literary theorists in their ivory towers. Instead it unveils fundamental
culture-specific opinions about reality and humankind, which are
narrativized in stories and novels.
Theories of narrative are misconstrued if they insist on abstraction Theory and practice
and lose touch with actual stories. This handbook aims to avoid this. It
is geared to a concrete illustration of the relevance – and the potential
shortcomings – of major narrative theories. This is why we constantly
refer to two short stories that we briefly present in this introduction and
that we have made available in the appendix to this book: “Pegasian” by
Charlotte Mutsaers and “The Map” by Gerrit Krol.1 Although these short
stories have been selected pretty much at random, they can still serve to
illustrate several basic problems of narration. In the introduction we only
indicate what these problems might be, and we formulate a number of
related questions. The rest of the book consists of the various answers
to those questions.