Narratology

Abstract

Abstract This book explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of narrative. Its aim is not to argue that modern narratologies simply present ‘old wine in new wineskins’, but to identify the diachronic affinities shared between ancient and modern stories about storytelling, recognizing that modern narratologists bring particular expertise to bear upon ancient literary theory and offer valuable insights into the interpretation of some notoriously difficult texts. By interrogating ancient and modern narratologies through the mutually imbricating dynamics of their reception it aims to arrive at a better understanding of both. Each chapter selects a key moment in the history of narratology on which to focus, zooming in from an overview of significant phases to look at core theories and texts—from the Russian formalists, Chicago school neo-Aristotelians, through the prestructuralists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, to the latest unnatural and antimimetic narratologists. The reception history that thus unfolds offers some remarkable plot twists. It unmasks Plato as an unreliable narrator and theorist, and offers a rare glimpse of Aristotle putting narrative theory into practice in the role of storyteller in his work On Poets. In Horace’s Ars Poetica and in the works of ancient scholia critics and commentators it locates a rhetorically conceived poetics and a sophisticated reader-response-based narratology evincing a keen interest in audience affect and cognition—and anticipating the cognitive turn in narratology’s mot recent postclassical phase.