For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts. The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on plot, character, and narrative discourse. A continued leader in the field of narrative studies, The Nature of Narrative offers unique and invaluable histories of both narrative and narrative theory.

Robert Scholes is Research Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative Literature, and MCM, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brown University. The author of many works of literary theory and pedagogy, he was President of the Modern Language Association in 2004. The late Robert Kellogg was a professor of English from 1957 until 1967, chairman of the English department from 1974 to 1978, and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences from 1978 to 1985 at the University of Virginia. He was the first principal of Brown College at Monroe Hill from 1985 to 1999. James Phelan is an internationally recognized expert in narrative theory. He is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the department of English at Ohio State University. He is the editor of the journal Narrative, and author of five books of narrative theory, including Living to Tell About It, and the forthcoming Experiencing Fiction.