A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
In literature, film, and other such arts, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature.
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).
Monika Fludernik, a native Austrian, is professor of English literature and culture at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany.
Brian G. McHale is a US academic and literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly relating to postmodernism and narrative theory. He is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at Ohio State University. His area of expertise is Twentieth-Century British and American Literature.
James Phelan is an American writer and literary scholar of narratology. He is a third-generation Neo-Aristotelian literary critic of the Chicago School whose work builds on and refines the work of Wayne C. Booth, with a focus on the rhetorical aspects of narrative. He is Distinguished University Professor of English at the Ohio State University.
In narratology, fabula refers to the chronological sequence of events within the world of a narrative and syuzhet equates to the sequence of events as they are presented to the reader. Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky originated the terminology as part of the Russian Formalism movement in the early 20th century. Narratologists have described fabula as "the raw material of a story", and syuzhet as "the way a story is organized".
Lubomír Doležel was a Czech literary theorist and one of the founders of the so-called fictional worlds theory.
Comics studies is an academic field that focuses on comics and sequential art. Although comics and graphic novels have been generally dismissed as less relevant pop culture texts, scholars in fields such as semiotics, aesthetics, sociology, composition studies and cultural studies are now re-considering comics and graphic novels as complex texts deserving of serious scholarly study.
Jakob Lothe is a Norwegian literary scholar and Professor of English literature at the University of Oslo.
Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.
Srinivas Aravamudan was an Indian-born American academic. He was a professor of English, Literature, and Romance Studies at Duke University, where he also served as dean of the humanities. He was widely recognized for his work on eighteenth-century British and French literature and postcolonial literature and theory. His publications included books and articles on novels, slavery, abolition, secularism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, climate change, and the anthropocene.
A children's film, or family film, is a film genre that generally relates to children in the context of home and family. Children's films are made specifically for children and not necessarily for a general audience, while family films are made for a wider appeal with a general audience in mind. Children's films come in several major genres like realism, fantasy, adventure, war, musicals, comedy, and literary adaptations.
The William Riley Parker Prize is the oldest award given by the Modern Language Association, the principal professional organization in the United States and Canada for scholars of language and literature. The Parker Prize is awarded each year for an “outstanding article” published in PMLA—the association's primary journal, and widely considered the most prestigious in the study of modern languages and literatures. It was first awarded in 1964 to David J. DeLaura, then a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, for his article, “Arnold and Carlyle,” which had been published in the March 1964 issue of PMLA.
Gerald J. Prince is an American academic and literary theoretician. He is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also affiliated with department of Linguistics and the Program in Comparative Literature, and with the Annenberg School for Communication.
Ruth Scodel is an American classicist. She is the D.R. Shackleton-Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. Scodel specialises in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in Homer, Hesiod and Greek Tragedy. Her research has been influenced by narrative theory, cognitive approaches, and politeness theory. In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Paul Dawson is an Australian writer of poetry and fiction and a scholar in the fields of narrative theory and the study of creative writing. He is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in the School of the Arts and Media. He teaches creative Writing, literary theory, North American Literature, and British and Irish Literature.
The narrative theory of equilibrium was proposed by Bulgarian narratologist Tzvetan Todorov in 1971. Todorov delineated this theory in an essay entitled The Two Principles of Narrative. The essay claims that all narratives contain the same five formal elements: equilibrium, disruption, recognition, resolution, and new equilibrium.
Narrative is an academic journal published by the Ohio State University that focuses on narratology. It is the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Narrative is published triannually in January, May, and October.
