Hühn Peter - Handbook of narratology. Volume 1

Over the last few decades, the field of narrative studies has been vastly expanded by a wide spectrum of innovations in the philologies and other disciplines including linguistics, history, theology, art history, psychology, media studies, medicine, law, education and more, and it has also seen a growing number of attempts to survey, order, and summarize the results of such studies in collections of essays, encyclopedias, companions, dictionaries, etc.

Against this background, the present Handbook of Narratology , now published in a considerably expanded second edition, offers a new type of systematic and comprehensive in-depth overview of recent and older research, taking account of the role played by the various disciplinary and national traditions in narrative studies. The 67 entries present international research devoted to the key terms, categories, and concepts of narratology in the form of full-length original articles structured in a parallel manner: each entry starts with a concise definition (1) followed by a more detailed explication of the term in question (2) and then proceeds, in its main part, to provide a differentiated description and critical discussion of the various approaches, positions, and controversies in their historical development (3), concluding with topics for further research (4) and a select bibliography (5). Where relevant, all entries are cross-referenced. They vary in length in accordance with the complexity of the respective concepts.

The entries devoted to the central categories and dimensions of narratology testify to the advanced state of narratological theory and to a high level of terminological and analytical precision. Such is not yet the case of topics dealt with in entries applying narratological concepts to disciplines and fields of study beyond literature. The authors of these articles thus seek to stake out the current state of nascent narrative research in these fields in a heuristic and explorative way, pointing to relevant features and issues rather than attempting to resolve basic questions. Nevertheless, these entries are of a particular interest and value, for they demonstrate the pervasiveness of narration in human culture and point to the fruitfulness of narratology for the description and analysis of narration in its prolific forms.

The Handbook of Narratology was first published by Walter de Gruyter in 2009 and was subsequently made available as an open-access Living Handbook of Narratology on the Internet. The original 32 articles of the first edition have been updated and 35 new articles have been added, first in the online version and now in the second print edition.

This handbook grew out of the work of the Narratology Research Group at Hamburg University (20012007) and the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology (founded in 2007).

We wish to thank Wilhelm Schernus for his expert subediting of the individual articles.

Hamburg and Paris

July 2014

Peter Hhn
Jan Christoph Meister
John Pier
Wolf Schmid