This book explores Herodotus’ creative interaction with the Greek poetic tradition from early hexameter verse through fifth-century Attic tragedy. The poetic tradition informs the Histories in both positive and negative ways, since Herodotus adopts or adapts some poetic features while rejecting others as a means of defining the nature of his own project. The range of such features includes subject matter; diction and phraseology; narrative motifs, themes, patterns, and structure; speech types and speech complexes; the role of the narrator – his presence, functions, source(s), authority, and limitations; the manipulation of time (narrative order, rhythm, and frequency); conceptions of truth and falsehood; the construction of the human past and its relation to the present; the relationship between humanity and deity, and the role each plays in the causation of events. In these and other regards Herodotus may use poetic precedent as a model, a foil, or some combination of the two.

The differences between the primary Homeric and Herodotean narrators are manifest: the former is covert and omniscient (thanks to the Muses), the latter overt and limited by his human (re)sources in exploring the past and other foreign countries. Both authors use secondary narratorial surrogates in order to highlight their own achievement in preserving the kleos of remarkable deeds. While Homeric surrogates from the heroic past (e.g., the bard Demodocus and the bard-like storyteller Odysseus) model expertise and status that the human bard aspires to in his own performance, Herodotus casts a more critical eye on the post-heroic inquiries of his textual avatars, whether “professional” (Hecataeus and Aristagoras) or “amateur” (typically monarchic investigations of foreign cultures, undertaken for personal profit). In a metatextual move without Homeric precedent, the experiences of advisor figures who are assimilated to the Herodotean narrator shed light on the strengths and limitations of knowledge gained through historiē.

History is not just a recounting of events; it is shaped by narrative style, cognitive frameworks, and the selection of time frames, all of which influence how events are understood. The chapter delves into the ‘linguistic turn’ in history, where language plays a crucial role in expressing and interpreting the past. Key elements of historical discourse, including narration, voice, time, and causation, are examined in depth.

The chapter also addresses the challenges of teaching history in a second language (L2), emphasizing the need for specialized instructional tools and rhetorical models. With references to a comprehensive chart of integrated descriptors for history across the curriculum and a genre map for bilingual history teaching, it underscores how controlling historical discourse through language can influence societies. Thus, this work also highlights the intersection of history, language, and ideology, especially in multilingual contexts.

This chapter delves into the phenomenon of the so-called mixed style, a distinctive feature found in certain literary compositions of the twelfth century. While focusing primarily on the renowned collection of four supplicatory poems known as Ptochoprodromika, it also examines instances of blending lower and higher language registers in the Grottaferrata version of the Digenis Akritis poem and in the Verses from Prison penned by Michael Glykas. The objective of this study is to re-evaluate existing scholarly viewpoints regarding the principles and functions underlying the shifts between language registers in these works, adopting a narratological perspective. In other words, by analysing the employed types of voice, such as direct speech, narration and metanarration, the chapter seeks to determine whether we can identify more specific principles governing the changes in language levels, beyond the general distinction between ‘more popular’ and ‘more learned’. It endeavours to demonstrate that the selection between lower and higher registers is intricately linked to the narrative distance of the speaking voice from the events being recounted.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

Children learn to distinguish registers for different roles: talk as child versus as adult, as girl versus boy, as parent versus child, as teacher, as doctor, marking each “voice” with intonation, vocabulary, and speech acts. They learn to mark gender and status with each role; what counts as polite, how to address different people, how to mark membership in a speech community (e.g., family, school, tennis players, chess players), and how to convey specific goals in conversation. They reply on experts for new word meanings and identify some adults as reliable sources of such information. They mark information as reliable or as second-hand, through use of evidentials. They adapt their speech to each addressee and take into account the common ground relevant to each from as young as 1;6 on. They keep track of what is given and what new, making use of articles (a versus the), and moving from definite noun phrases (new) to pronouns (given). They learn to be persuasive, and persistent, bargaining in their negotiations. They give stage directions in pretend play. And they start to use figurative language. They learn how questions work at school. And they learn how to tell stories.

This chapter analyzes the works of brother and sister Lucio Victorio Mansilla and Eduarda Mansilla, two fundamental figures in the cultural life of nineteenth-century Argentina, whose personal trajectories took them to Europe and the United States. Journalist, military man, and politician Lucio penned what can be considered the first ethnographic record of the Indigenous peoples of the Pampas; Eduardo was an accomplished novelist, travel writer, journalist, and musician who published in both Spanish and French. In this chapter the work of both siblings is read together. It takes into account the centrality of Lucio in the field of Argentinean literature and proposes that Eduarda illuminates different areas of the cultural intellectual life of nineteenth-century Argentina. Focus is on Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870) by Lucio V. Mansilla and two novels by Eduarda Mansilla – El médico de San Luis (1860) and Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas, published in French in 1869 and translated by Lucio – to reflect on the relationship between narration and the state, practices of everyday life, sociability, and family stories, as well as their circulation and consecration mechanisms.

Discourses about comics focus very often on their narrative dimension to the extent that they are frequently considered as narratives per se. Driven by the ambition to rethink established formulas, alternative publishers show examples of works that invite to move beyond this approach. This chapter looks at comics that do not tell a story (in the narrow sense of the word) or question familiar narratives. It focuses on abstract comics or comics made of series of unrelated images. Building on the works of creators that tend to remain under the radar such as Rosaire Appel, Renée French, Tim Gaze, or Bianca Stone, this chapter delineates possibilities for understanding these creations and the specific kinds of pleasure they generate. By highlighting their links with other media, in particular music and poetry, it emphasizes how the reader’s response is closely linked to their horizon of expectations. Finally, it shows that the study of comics that are at the limits of narration allow to reassess how we see comics in general, including those that privilege the story.

Chapter 4 illustrates and discusses in detail the steps taken to evaluate the research questions. It first clarifies the methodological approach and then introduces the study design. The declared aim is to create a study that combines the larger number of tokens per speaker created by an experimental framework with the sample diversity and natural environment needed for sociolinguistic analyses. Further sections deal with the sample and the procedure. In this study, seventy-nine speakers with various gender, ethnicity, and age profiles were asked to complete naming tasks, a reading task, a re-narration and a free interview with a meta commentary section.

“Passivity: The Passion of Oroonoko and the Ethics of Narration” recovers a historical meaning of “passive obedience,” a precursor to modern theories of civil disobedience, and it uses this concept to read both the protagonist, an African prince enslaved in a new world colony, and the narrator, a colonial woman writer, of Oroonoko. It argues that the narrator of Oroonoko, and by inference novelistic narration in general, is based on assumptions about the ethics of individual detachment (or ironic distance) from political action. In recovering the idea of passive obedience and the figure of Christ’s passion as a model for novelistic narration and a conservative ethics of citizenship under liberalism, this chapter offers a critique of liberal theories of political action as well as an argument against the novel’s foundation in liberal theories of individualization and agency. It also takes up the problems of racism and slavery as central to understanding both the liberal/conservative dynamic and the development of the novel form.

Storytelling can be understood as a performative social event that instantiates a specific relationship between storyteller and audience. This relationship supports inferences of narrative causation in hearers, both locally (episode x caused episode y) and globally (repeated patterns of causation at a more abstract level). This applies to passages of performative speech in a narrative event that are non-narrative, such as description or digression. Scientific writing is often conceived as non-performative and impersonal, with causation expressed explicitly. However, I suggest in this chapter that discourse of this kind can make the task of configuring global patterns of causation more difficult. Performative narrative discourse, on the other hand, offers support for readers in the task of remodelling existing theoretical causal structures through reconceptualization. I illustrate this argument through an analysis of narrative and non-narrative performative discourse in the field of cognitive psychology.

How can we judiciously tell the many continuous, discontinuous, overlapping, persistent, and simultaneous, tales that constitute German history?Taking as an example James J. Sheehan’s engagement with the question: “what is German history?”, the introduction argues that the conceit inherent in the question is the belief that a unitary history must exist, even when the decades of scholarship Sheehan inspired indicated that it does not.In actuality, German history can only ever be regarded as an aggregate of Germans’ histories, and it is critical that we begin by recognizing that a great many of the people who lived those histories did so without regarding difference and unity as antinomies or hybridities as problems. Adopting that position has a number of advantages.It not only allows us to better understand the actions of the great variety of people who thought of themselves and were regarded by others as German during the modern era, it also helps us to gain a better understanding of the roles Germans and German things have played in the history of the modern world.

Who is telling the story and how are they telling it? The difference between the author and the narrator. Respective advantages and disadvantages of first- and third-person narrative voices. Varieties of first-person narrative. Unreliable narrators. Varieties of third-person narrative. Multiple narrative viewpoints. Direct address to the reader. ‘Other world’ narrative voices.

‘Most stories pivot on the question of which character knows what and – crucially – what your reader knows and when you let them know it. The choice of narrative voice and point of view defines how much the reader can know.’

This chapter focuses on how two involuntary (and often invisible) physical responses, blanching and blushing, are performed and narrated on the early modern stage, asking who describes bodies, whose bodies are described, and what is at stake in the act of description. Whipday explores how blanching and blushing intersects with early modern hierarchies of gender, class, family, and race, especially as mediated by the (white) body of the (boy) actor in ‘blushface’ and blackface performances of femininity. In so doing, she examines narrated bodily responses as dramaturgical devices for negotiating relationships between the physicality of character and performer; between performer and audience in the audience’s engagement with the world of the play as mapped onto the simultaneously real and imagined body of the actor; and, between onstage characters within hierarchical familial, domestic, and service relationships.

This chapter shows that a lack of self-consciously literary excess in Kipling’s prose was sometimes mistaken for the absence of style. Yet there is a control in Kipling’s writing that a careful and sensitive reading can access. The chapter considers a particular habit of punctuation in Kipling: the use of a semicolon followed by a strictly superfluous ‘and’. This mark of punctuation advertises the writtenness of the prose and so signals the presence of a knowing narrator, whilst also raising questions about causation and consequence.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

Given the challenges war posed for direct physical representation on the Elizabethan stage, much of Shakespeare’s mimetic success depends on his techniques of linguistic construction, especially of narrated war scenes and dialogic encounters. For narrated scenes, Shakespeare follows Marlowe in translating the “high-astounding terms” of the classical grand style to the Elizabethan stage, a choice with ideological implications explored in the chapter. Shakespeare often favors the prospective narration of imagined war scenes, turning potentially static description into the terrorizing speech acts of Henry V and other leaders. In dialogic encounters, Shakespeare develops the dynamics of verbal quarrels and of diplomacy as themselves central events of war. Plays like King John parse war as dysfunctional communication and explore what meager possibilities verbal diplomacy affords for remediation. The chapter assesses contradictions inherent in a rhetorical culture that idealizes eloquence as peacemaking and yet makes eloquence the default language for violent militarism.