A Companion to Narrative Theory Edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz The 35 original essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry. The essays represent all the major critical approaches to narrative - narratological, rhetorical, feminist, post-structuralist, historicist - and investigate and debate the relations among them. In addition, they stretch the boundaries of the field by considering narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine, and in a variety of media, including film, music and painting. The volume is divided into six parts: competing accounts of the history of the field; examinations of recurrent problems; suggestions for theoretical revisions and innovations; explorations of the relations among form, history, politics, and ethics; analyses of the way narrative operates in different disciplines and in media beyond the written word; and speculations about the future of narrative and of narrative theory. At the same time, it offers provocative analyses of a wide range of works, both canonical and popular, from the Bible through novels by Dickens, Woolf and Arundhati Roy on to Bernard Herrmann's film music and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. Among its contributors are many of the leading figures in the field, including such early pioneers as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller, and Gerald Prince. The Editors James Phelan is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the editor of the journal Narrative and the author of several books in narrative theory, the most recent of which are Narrative as Rhetoric (1996); and Living to Tell About it: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005). Peter J. Rabinowitz is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College. His previous publications include Before Reading (1987) and Authorized Readers (coauthored with Michael Smith, 1998). He is also a music critic and serves as a contributing editor of Fanfare. Phelan and Rabinowitz are coeditors of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.