ABSTRACT
The briefest survey of high culture or the content of everyday conversation will indicate the importance of story-telling. It might be expected that narrative, whether in prose or verse, would always have provided an important focus of study. In the sense that narrative frameworks have been identified as significant in literary criticism since the time of Aristotle, this has been the case. Yet, according to Oriega and García Landa (1996), Japan is the only part of the world where an advanced culture has seen narrative as such as a major literary genre. Certainly in the culture whose roots were in Western Europe, narrative itself was neglected in literary criticism until the last part of the twentieth century. Plays and longer poems that had a narrative framework were discussed for merits other than their storylines. When the novel had established itself as a literary form, there was still more interest in the light it cast upon society, in the values of the novelist and in the details of style, than there was in the narrative structure. E.M.Forster (1993), himself a famous novelist, described the story as a ‘low atavistic form’ to be valued only for the ‘truth’ and ‘melody’ that could be built around this basic structure.
