ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces narrative theory, the book’s overarching theoretical-analytical framework. It discusses its origins in Aristotle’s Poetics and then presents its main contemporary proponents, above all Hayden White. The bulk of the chapter presents narrative theory’s principal claims, such as that empirical reality is essentially chaotic and meaningless; that sense and action emerge in and through storytelling; that stories are literary artifacts fashioned through poetics and narrativization; that even factual narratives possess a nonfactual dimension—“content of the form” (White), “synoptic judgment” (Mink), “narrative substance” (Ankersmit)—on account of their artificial structure; and that formally, factual and fictional narratives cannot be distinguished without a priori assumptions about what kind of truth each is supposed to deal in. White’s tropological framework for analysis of factual narrative representations of historical reality is laid out at length. The chapter does not neglect to subject narrative theory to critical assessment probing its strengths and weaknesses. It fleshes out its western Marxist inspirations and emancipatory counterhegemonic politics, surveys and evaluates its main criticisms, and situates it in the context of modernist and postmodernist historical theory and literary studies.
