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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
  • David Herman
H. Porter Abbott. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. xiii + 203 pp.

As the author explains in his “Preface,” the purpose of H. Porter Abbott’s insightful, well-organized, and eminently readable book is “to help readers understand what narrative is, how it is constructed, how it acts upon us, how we act upon it, how it is transmitted, how it changes when the medium or the cultural context changes, and how it is found not just in the arts but everywhere in the ordinary course of people’s lives, many times a day” (xi). Written in an unfailingly lucid style that nonetheless refuses to “dumb down” the major research questions facing analysts of stories, this book provides an ideal starting point for readers seeking a synoptic overview of recent scholarship on narrative. More than just a primer for readers unfamiliar with previous research on stories, however, Abbott’s book itself represents a significant contribution to the field of narrative studies.

To be sure, the book is aptly titled an Introduction to the subject; a number of features make this study an invaluable first resource for educated nonexperts as well as an appropriate textbook for classes focusing on narrative—e.g., advanced undergraduate and graduate classes in such (sub)disciplines as communication studies, discourse analysis, narratology, women’s and gender studies, literary theory, history, comparative media studies, and critical legal theory. Especially helpful are the brief, boxed “insets” that slow down the unfolding discussion to address particularly thorny terms, concepts, and issues; the lists of selected secondary sources and additional primary texts included at the end of each chapter; and the useful, 10-page glossary and topical index, which contains thumbnail definitions of terms ranging from focalization and lexia to narrativity and paratext. Likewise, readers new to the subject will benefit from the way in which the book’s chapters build on one another, moving cumulatively from basic categories and distinctions toward richer, more complicated problem domains in which narrative analysts are still struggling to find their way. Abbott’s early chapters thus discuss the universality of narrative (1–3), the distinction between story (what is told) and discourse (the way it is told) (14–17), and the contrast between constituent and supplementary events (20–22). These initial chapters also explore the idea of narrativity (i.e., the degree to which a story lends itself to being interpreted as a story) (22–23), the question of whether causality is a necessary component of narrative (37–40), and the rhetorical impact of competing strategies for narrating events (46–48). Later chapters then build on these foundational materials to extend the scope of Abbott’s analysis, providing an accessible survey of issues that include narratorial (un)reliability (69–70), narrative gaps or omissions (83–85), the role of themes and motifs in stories (88–90), and theories of character (123–31).

Yet it is the mark of a first-rate study like Abbott’s to have broad-based appeal, with something to offer to readers of all sorts. Accordingly, specialists in the field, and not just newcomers, will be rewarded by a careful examination of this book. Particularly noteworthy, in this respect, is Abbott’s suggestive discussion of the story-enabled process by which certain situations and events become “normalized” or accepted as given, as well as his account of the story-enabling “masterplots” on which individual narratives draw, more or less explicitly, to assimilate particularities to more generic models for understanding [End Page 263] the world (40–46). Narrative analysts will also do well to consult the author’s illuminating chapter on the problem of closure in narrative (51–61), along with his comparison and contrast of what he terms intentional, symptomatic, and adaptive readings of stories (95–103). (Abbott’s account of this last mode of interpretation is complemented by his follow-up chapter on the adaptation of stories across media [105–20].) Finally, with a characteristic blend of sophistication and lucidity, and spanning narratives as diverse as those associated with the 1892 trial of Lizzie Borden, the Old Testament story of King Solomon’s wisdom, and Sophocles...

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