If we were to compile a list of frequently asked questions about narrative theory, we would put the following two at or near the top: 'what is narrative theory?' and 'how do different approaches to narrative relate to each other?' This book addresses both questions and, more significantly, also demonstrates the extent to which the questions themselves are intertwined.

Narrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. This text presents a wide-ranging and wholly original approach to understanding the nature of narrative.

The renowned naturalist, Loren Eisely, observed that we humans have given up the “certainty of the animal that what it senses is exactly there in the shape the eye beholds.” The big question is, what did we get in return? This book provides a convincing answer to this question, arguing that, instead of recording reality, your brain uses your experience to create a story, a narrative, about how what happened to you in the past led to what is happening to you now. This narrative is your private reality. The book continues by showing how replacing recorded reality with private narrative enabled humans to anticipate the fundamentally unknowable immediate and remote future and expose potential threats. It then shows how private narrative enabled complex thought and communication with others. Drawing upon a wide range of research, the book provides a stimulating new way of viewing human experience, thinking, communicating, and action.

Byron Almén proposes an original synthesis of approaches to musical narrative from literary criticism, semiotics, historiography, musicology, and music theory, resulting in a significant critical reorientation of the field. This volume includes an extensive survey of traditional approaches to musical narrative illustrated by a wide variety of musical examples that highlight the range and applicability of the theoretical apparatus. Almén provides a careful delineation of the essential elements and preconditions of musical narrative organization, an eclectic analytical model applicable to a wide range of musical styles and repertoires, a classification scheme of narrative types and subtypes reflecting conceptually distinct narrative strategies, a wide array of interpretive categories, and a sensitivity to the dependence of narrative interpretation on the cultural milieu of the work, its various audiences, and the analyst. A Theory of Musical Narrative provides both an excellent introduction to an increasingly important conceptual domain and a complex reassessment of its possibilities and characteristics.

This book presents a unique and intuitively compelling way of understanding how humans think. It argues that narratives are the natural mode of thinking, that the “urge” to think narratively reflects known neurological processes, and that, although narrative thinking is a product of evolution, it enables us to transcend our evolutionary limits and actively shape our own futures. In remarkably engaging language, the authors describe how the currency of neural activity in the brain is transformed into the qualitatively different currency of conscious experience—the everyday, purposeful, story-like experience with which we all are familiar. The book then examines the nature of thought and how it leads to purposeful action, discussing, among other concerns, how memories about the past, perceptions about the present, and expectations about the future are structured as plausible, coherent narratives by causation, purpose, and time, and how errors are introduced into one’s narratives, both naturally and by other people (often intentionally), and how those errors bias one’s expectations about the future and the actions taken (or not taken) as a consequence. Each of these discussions is followed by a commentary that ties them to interesting facts and questions from throughout the physical and social sciences. The book is concluded with the argument that narrative thought is what is meant when one uses the word “mind.”

Narrative Theory offers an introduction to the field's critical and philosophical approaches towards narrative throughout history.

Since its first publication in English in 1985, Mieke Bal's "Narratology" has become a classic introduction to the major elements comprising a comprehensive theory of narrative texts. In this second edition Professor Bal broadens the spectrum of her theoretical model, updating the chapters on literary narrative and adding new examples from outside of the field of literary studies. Some specific additions include discussions on dialogue in narrative, translation as transformation (including intermedia translation), intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and the place of the subject in narratology. Two new chapters, one on visualization and visual narrative with examples from art and film and the other an examination of anthropological views of narrative, lead Bal to conclude with a re-evaluation of narratology in light of its applications outside the realm of the literary.