Narrative

Although the study of narrative goes back as far as Aristotle's Poetics, narrative theory emerged as a distinct field of inquiry only in the second half of the twentieth century. At that point, work on the theory of the novel intersected with structuralism's project of writing the grammar of stories and storytelling. This intersection in turn opened out to other streams of traffic in narrative studies, including the analysis of oral narrative by sociolinguists; reflections on historical narrative by historiographers; and the varied investigations of film scholars, among others. In the early twenty-first century many other disciplines—medicine, law, business, and psychoanalysis, prominent among them—both draw upon and contribute to narrative theory (see sidebar). In this respect, contemporary interdisciplinary thought has undergone a "narrative turn."