Gerald Prince

History, literature, religion, myth, film, psychology, theory, and daily conversation all rely heavily on narrative. Cutting across many disciplines, narratology describes and analyzes the language of narrative with its regularly recurring patterns, deeply established conventions for transmission, and interpretive codes, whether in novels, cartoons, or case studies. Indispensable to writers, critics, and scholars in many fields, A Dictionary of Narratology provides quick and reliable access to terms and concepts that are defined, illustrated, and cross-referenced. All entries are keyed to articles or books in which the terms originated or are exemplified. This revised edition contains additional entries and updates some existing ones.

Do words—their sounds and shapes, their lengths and patterns—imitate the world? Mimology says they do. First argued in Plato's Cratylus more than two thousand years ago, mimology has left an important mark in virtually every major art and artistic theory thereafter. Fascinating and many-faceted, mimology is the basis of language sciences and incites occasional hilarity. Its complicated traditions require a sure grip but a light touch. One of the few scholars capable of giving mimology such genial attention is Gérard Genette. Genette treats matters as basic and staid as the alphabet and as reverberating as the letter R in ur-linguistics. Genette has emerged as one of the two or three chief literary critics of modern France. He is the major practitioner of narratological criticism, a pioneer in structuralism, and a much admired literary historian. His single most important book, Mimologics bridges mainstream literary history and Genette's expertise in critical method by undertaking an intensive study of the most vexed of literary problems: language as a representation of reality. Deeply learned, the book draws upon the traditions—both sane and eccentric—of philosophy, linguistics, poetics, and comparative literature.

In literature the very act of narration often constitutes a theme: everyone is familiar with narration that interrupts the story, that provides an ironic gloss on the action, that exposes the narrator, that serves to deceive. In Narrative as Theme Gerald Prince offers the first book-length study of the theme of narrative and of the relationship between narrative and truth in fiction. In the first part, theoretical in nature, Prince considers the notion of theme as well as the theme of narrative itself, surveys the research that has come out of that notion, and isolates starting points for the investigation of narrative as theme. Of particular interest to narratologists will be his discussion of the "disnarrated," all those passages of a text that consider what did not or does not happen but oculd have. He shows how the disnarrated is an important guide to reading the theme of narrative. The second part focuses on seven French novels: Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, Voltaire's Candide, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Sartre's La Nausée, Maupassant's Bel-Ami, Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres, and Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures. Written in first and third person, absorbed or not in the act of narration, variously concerned with history, ethics, and psychology, these classical, modern, and postmodern works exemplify basic positions with regard to the truth or value of narrative.His Dictionary of Narratology, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1987, confirmed Gerald Prince as one of the world's leading narratologists.