The Cambridge Companion to Narrative provides a unique and valuable overview of current approaches to narrative study. An international team of experts explores ideas of storytelling and methods of narrative analysis as they have emerged across diverse traditions of inquiry and in connection with a variety of media, from film and television, to storytelling in the 'real-life' contexts of face-to-face interaction, to literary fiction. Each chapter presents a survey of scholarly approaches to topics such as character, dialogue, genre or language, shows how those approaches can be brought to bear on a relatively well-known illustrative example, and indicates directions for further research. Featuring a chapter reviewing definitions of narrative, a glossary of key terms and a comprehensive index, this is an essential resource for both students and scholars in many fields, including language and literature, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, jurisprudence, communication and media studies, and the social sciences.

Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Introduction David Herman; 2. Toward a definition of narrative Marie-Laure Ryan; Part II. Studying Narrative Fiction: A Starter-kit: 3. Story, plot, and narration H. Porter Abbott; 4. Time and space Teresa Bridgeman; 5. Character Uri Margolin; 6. Dialogue Bronwen Thomas; 7. Focalization Manfred Jahn; 8. Genre Heta Pyrhönen; Part III. Other Narrative Media (A Selection): 9. Conversational storytelling Neal R. Norrick; 10. Drama and narrative Brian Richardson; 11. Film and television narrative Jason Mittell; 12. Narrative and digital media Nick Montfort; Part IV. Further Contexts for Narrative Study: 13. Gender Ruth Page; 14. Rhetoric/ethics James Phelan; 15. Ideology Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck; 16. Language Michael Toolan; 17. Cognition, emotion, and consciousness David Herman; 18. Identity/alterity Monika Fludernik; Further reading; Glossary; Index.