This two-volume study traces developments in English narrative structure from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, building on the theses set out in Monika Fludernik’s award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996).
This two-volume study traces developments in English narrative structure from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, building on the theses set out in Monika Fludernik’s award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996).
Developments in Narrative Structure analyzes the medieval verse and prose romance, verse and prose hagiography, the fabliau, historical writing, letters, the early modern romance and low-style prose as well as the epic. Deploying linguistic and narratological methodology, the study provides a wide-ranging survey of how narrative develops and diversifies during these five centuries. It discusses continuities and discontinuities, as well as functional repurposing of familiar strategies, and traces the complex and often contradictory changes in form and function. The analyses moreover allow for a comparison between developments in verse and prose texts from a chronological as well as intergeneric perspective.
This authoritative work is an invaluable resource for literary scholars, linguists, and especially to narratologists and scholars of historical pragmatics. Among literature specialists, it will be of interest to literary historians, medievalists, early modern scholars, and for those interested in the rise of the novel and its antecedents.
Volume I
Preface; PART I: Introductory and Theoretical;
1. Introduction - Monika
Fludernik ;
2. Diachrony Reconsidered - Monika Fludernik; PART II: THE MIDDLE
ENGLISH PERIOD;
3. Narrative Verse I: The Romance - Anne Herlyn;
4. Narrative
Verse II: The Saint's Legend - Monika Fludernik;
5. Narrative Verse III: The
Fabliau and Short Comic Narrative - Theresa Hamilton and Monika Fludernik;
6.
Narrative Prose I: The Late Medieval Prose Romances - Sonia García de Alba
Lobeira
Volume II
PART III: FROM MIDDLE ENGLISH TO EARLY NEW ENGLISH;
7. Historical Narrative,
1066-1700 - Anne Herlyn;
8. Narrative Prose II: Prose Hagiography - Thomas
Lederer;
9. Letters, 1400-1650 - Monika Fludernik; PART IV: THE EARLY MODERN
PERIOD;
10. Epic Verse: Spenser, Milton and Dryden - Roman Barton;
11.
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Romances - Sebastian Straßburg;
12.
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Prose in the Low Style - Tanja Haferkorn
and Monika Fludernik; PART V: Summary and Conclusions;
13. Summary of Results
and Discussion - Monika Fludernik;
14. Final Considerations - Monika
Fludernik; Author Index; Subject Index
Monika Fludernik is Professor Emerita at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where she taught from 1994 to 2025. Her research interests include narratology, literary linguistics, postcolonial studies, law and literature and eighteenth-century aesthetics.
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