Product Description

Featuring a major synthesis and critique of interdisciplinary narrative theory, marks a watershed moment in the study of narrative. David Herman argues that narrativeis simultaneously a cognitive style, a discourse genre, and a resource for writing. Because stories are strategies that help humans make sense of their world, narratives not only have a logic but also are a logic in their own right, providing an irreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience. brings together and pointedly examines key concepts of narrative in literary criticism, linguistics, and cognitive science, supplementing them with a battery of additional concepts that enable many different kinds of narratives to be analyzed and understood. By thoroughly tracing and synthesizing the development of different strands of narrative theory and provocatively critiquing what narratives are and how they work, provides a powerful interpretive tool kit that broadens the applicability of narrative theory to more complex forms of stories, however and wherever they appear. offers a fresh and incisive way to appreciate more fully the power and significance of narratives.