In 1921, T. S. Eliot declared that 'poets in our civilization . . . must be difficult'. The publication in the following year of The Waste Land served to confirm the truth of this pronouncement: Eliot's bristlingly allusive poem, and its seven pages of accompanying notes, insists that 'difficulty' is a sine qua non of the modernist artwork. For other practitioners of modernist poetics, like William Carlos Williams, the learnedness of Eliot's poem returned poetry to the classroom: arguably, however, Williams's democratic model of modernist poetry requires as much exegesis for the twenty-first-century reader as Eliot's elitist masterpiece. After all, critics have expended as much ingenuity in surmising what depends on Williams's red wheelbarrow, in his sixteen-word poem of that title, as they have in pursuing the meaning of Tarot cards and the Holy Grail in Eliot's pocket epic. Between the polar extremes represented by Eliot and Williams we find a heterogeneous array of modernist poetries. The broad church of poetic modernism includes Wallace Stevens's post-Arnoldian idea of poetry as a substitute for religion; the avant-garde 'écriture feminine' of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Mina Loy; and the cultural nationalisms of African-American and certain Irish and Scottish poetry of the period.

Modernist poetry involves recuperations of history and Futurist and Dada abandonments of tradition; arcane and demotic registers of language; elitist and populist forms of literature. The rich diversity of modernist poetries, no less than the particular difficulties presented by The Waste Land, inevitably necessitates the kind of 'classroom assistance' Williams believed the 'new art' was on the point of escaping.

If narratology - the structural theory and analysis of narrative texts - were to be divided into just two major parts, then narration and focalization would be very suitable candidates. Narration is the telling of a story in a way that simultaneously respects the needs and enlists the co-operation of its audience; focalization is the submission of (potentially limitless) narrative information to a perspectival filter. Contrary to the standard courtroom injunction to tell “the whole truth,” no-one can in fact tell all. Practical reasons require speakers and writers to restrict information to the “right amount” - not too little, not too much, and if possible only what's relevant.

In its original conception, dating back to the late 1960s, narratology is a timeless and culture-independent discipline. Yet narratologists have increasingly become aware of the fact that their seemingly neutral theoretical models may have been shaped by cultural and historical contingencies. This is definitely so in the case of focalization because our present notions about perspectival filtering would hardly exist without the psychological interest that informs Western narrative literature from roughly the eighteenth century novel onwards. The psychological turn reaches its height with the institution of psychology as a discipline and the flowering of the Modernist literary movement in the period of 1900 to 1950. Let us try to unravel this historical background by taking a brief look at the narrative aesthetics of the Modernist era.

As one of the most significant literary movements of the twentieth century, the Harlem Renaissance (1900-40) reflects the significance of African-American cultural expression during the modernist period. Nonetheless, critical discussions of African-American literature typically treat modernism as a movement separate and distinct from the Harlem Renaissance. As Houston Baker notes, 'Traditionally in discussions of Afro-American literature and culture, “modernism” implies the work of British, Irish, and Anglo-American writers and artists of the early twentieth century.' While this may stem from a tendency among critics to view African-American literature as separate and distinct from Anglo-American, British and Irish literature, the Harlem Renaissance's relationship and connection with the modernist movement reflects the conceptualisation of racial identity and consciousness during the early to mid twentieth century. Consequently, poetry of the Harlem Renaissance attempts to capture the perspective of African-American writers within the context of the modern world. African-American poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Helene Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Angelina Weld Grimkè explored central themes such as history, identity, community, race, class, gender and heritage, which continue to influence contemporary African-American poetry and its rendering of the human experience.

The rhetorical approach conceives of narrative as a purposive communicative act. In this view, narrative is not just a representation of events but is also itself an event - one in which someone is doing something with a representation of events. More formally, the rhetorical theorist defines narrative as somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened. This conception has several significant consequences for the kinds of knowledge about narrative the approach seeks. It gives special attention to the relations among tellers, audiences, and the something that has happened. The focus on purposes includes a recognition that narrative communication is a multi-layered event, one in which tellers seek to engage and influence their audiences' cognition, emotions, and values. Moreover, the approach recognizes that, in telling what happened, narrators give accounts of characters whose interactions with each other have an ethical dimension and that the acts of telling and receiving these accounts also have an ethical dimension. Consequently, the rhetorical approach attends to both an ethics of the told and an ethics of the telling.

In this chapter, I want to elaborate on these points and to demonstrate what rhetorical interpretation of narrative looks like. Therefore, I will first offer a brief, partial analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Cask of Amontillado,” and then turn to a short account of the approach's historical evolution. From there I will go on to elaborate its main underlying principles, a move that will also prepare the way for a return to Poe's story and a completion of the rhetorical analysis.

At this point in “The Dead,” the last short story included in James Joyce's 1914 collection Dubliners, Gabriel Conroy is taking a moment by himself just before dinner is served at the holiday party hosted annually by Gabriel's two aunts, Kate and Julia Morkan, and by their niece, Mary Jane. Gabriel is trying to prepare himself for the speech he is to deliver after dinner. This moment is followed in turn by a life-changing revelation by his wife, Gretta, who tells Gabriel about how a young man named Michael Furey in effect chose her over life itself, standing out in a cold rain in ill-health for one last chance to see her. Below I provide a fuller synopsis of “The Dead” as a basis for exploring the crucial role that representations of consciousness play in the narrative as a whole; but let me dwell for a moment on the many manifestations of Gabriel's mind in just these few lines. Building on work by narrative scholars such as Alan Palmer and Ralf Schneider, my preliminary discussion suggests that analyzing fictional minds like Gabriel's entails giving an account of readers' minds, too - of how readers interpret particular textual details as information about characters' attempts to make sense of the world around them.

Ideology and narratology

Although early work in narratology focused mainly on the structures of stories rather than the contexts in which stories were told and interpreted, narrative theorists such as Roland Barthes indicated ways in which the study of narrative could be fruitfully combined with the study of the beliefs, norms, and values that constitute what has come to be termed ideology. For example, Barthes's 1966 essay “Introduction to the Structuralist Analysis of Narratives” pointed to the way a certain ideological conception of identity or personhood influenced previous understandings of the concept of “character” in narrative. Specifically, Barthes argued that a bourgeois conception of personhood had influenced literary critics to view characters as beings with a psychological essence rather than agents in narrated worlds that are defined by what they do or how they act. In this chapter, we extend Barthes's and others' suggestions to examine ways in which narrative procedures intersect with ideological issues. Building on the work of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci, we define ideology as a body of norms and ideas that appear natural as a result of their continuous and mostly tacit promotion by the dominant forces in society. On the basis of this working definition, we investigate how research on stories can profit from greater attention to matters of ideology. Then we use F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby to show how the various connections between narrative and ideology can be developed in interpretation.

The process by which canonical reputations are made is more finely grained, subtly contextualised, and gradual, than many literary critics, with ideological axes to grind, acknowledge. The mechanisms of cultural influence that brought about the revolution of poetic taste associated with modernism were extremely complex and variegated: manifestoes, prefaces, introductions; vigorous and partisan debates in newspapers and literary magazines; selections in anthologies; pamphlets, essays and full-length studies; not forgetting the impact of modernist movements beyond the English-speaking world. The intellectual historian must seek to gauge the socioeconomic conditions in which modernist poetry was mediated and received, even the effects of intangibles (such as private conversation) that have now seeped into the shifting sands of canon formation. Taken together, attempts to reconstruct this intricate constellation of factors can leave accounts of the modernist canon a little under-explained. However, the main thread to follow does emerge clearly with the benefit of historical hindsight: it involves tracing the emergence of the new poetic in the avant-garde 'little magazines' established just before or during the First World War; the subsequent discussion of this poetry in the critical reviews of the interwar period; culminating in the institutional consolidation of a revolutionary poetic moment in university textbooks and syllabuses after the Second World War.

In 1926 Agatha Christie published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, dedicating it “to Punkie who likes an orthodox detective story, murder, inquest, and suspicion falling on everyone in turn!” The title signals to readers what kind of book Christie's narrative is, a classification that the dedication reinforces. The dedication specifies the basic components of an “orthodox” detective story: it begins with murder, which is followed by an investigation spotlighting each character in turn as a possible murderer, until the crime is solved and guilt is brought home to a specific character. As if these markers were not enough, the book abounds with references to detective stories: characters discuss their conventions and the book's first-person narrator, Dr. Sheppard, finds himself in the position of a “Watson,” the detective's friend and aid. These clues supply readers with a pragmatic user's guide to detective fiction.

This characterization of Christie's book is grounded in the notion of genre, grouping texts together on the basis of certain shared features. It suggests that relating a text to a genre may serve a number of different purposes. First, genre helps us to describe texts by singling out textual components worthy of attention such as plot structure; in turn, description helps us to classify a text by placing it among other similar texts. In this view, genres are principled groupings of texts. Second, genre directs the ways in which we write, read, and interpret texts. Without some shared conception of what, for example, a narrative is, writers would be unable to communicate with readers. A genre functions as a norm or an expectation guiding writers in their work and readers in their encounter with texts. Third, genre prescribes artistic practices. Generic conventions are normative, telling authors what they should and should not do. By claiming to have written an orthodox detective story, Christie shows her awareness of genre's prescriptive role. Fourth, genres help us to evaluate literary works.

In this introduction I seek to provide context for the chapters that follow by addressing questions that many readers of this volume are likely to have - particularly readers coming to the field of narrative studies for the first time. These questions include: Why a Companion to Narrative? What is narrative (what are its identifying traits and key functions)? What are some of the major trends in recent scholarship on narrative? What are the distinctive features of this book, and some strategies for using it? My attempt to address the second of these questions (what is narrative?) is meant to be read in tandem with chapter 2, where Marie-Laure Ryan reviews recent suggestions about what constitutes a narrative and proposes her own definition. Conversely, this introduction should afford a sense of the broader research tradition from which attempts to define narrative have emerged.

The working definition that I myself will be using in this introduction, and that I spell out in greater detail below, runs as follows. Rather than focusing on general, abstract situations or trends, stories are accounts of what happened to particular people - and of what it was like for them to experience what happened - in particular circumstances and with specific consequences. Narrative, in other words, is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change - a strategy that contrasts with, but is in no way inferior to, “scientific” modes of explanation that characterize phenomena as instances of general covering laws.

The language of a narrative: different wordings, different stories

The focus in this chapter is on the verbal detail that linguistic categories and distinctions can help us to pinpoint in the composition of literary narratives. My example text is Joyce's “Two Gallants.” Linguistic descriptions may not always be able to explain what it is in a passage of literary narrative that makes it particularly effective or striking or moving, but such descriptions can help to make us more aware of the kinds of distinct, even unique, verbal texture a text may have, and more aware of how if a story was narrated - worded - otherwise, it would have created a very different effect. It would, in fact, be a different story.

What happens in “Two Gallants”?

The following is a synopsis of James Joyce’s short story “Two Gallants,” which was published in 1914 as part of Dubliners:

Reading modernist poetry today, we usually sit in classrooms, holding literary anthologies or volumes of collected or selected poems. Such encounters, mediated by institutions of publication and the academy, minimise modernist poetry's original social and institutional contexts. But many poems now considered canonically modernist were first produced in the early twentieth-century milieu of social and artistic experiment in which a generation of young artists and writers endeavoured to cross the 'great divide' between 'art' and 'life' and remake both. Converging in major cities, these would-be modernists collaborate and compete for cultural attention in the world of modern print capitalism. They initiate a phenomenon today termed the 'historical avant garde', an unprecedented irruption across the West of oppositional artistic movements, experimental art and writing, little magazines and alternative presses, unconventional performances, and spectacular happenings. During the first thirty years of the century, scores of these groups, works and events proliferate. New schools and movements spring up across Europe and America, a plethora of new 'isms' vying for attention: Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Surrealism, Dada.

Peter Bürger has influentially argued that the avant-garde ambition to cross the divide between art and life praxis is ultimately thwarted by the inherent aestheticism of the institution of art under bourgeois capitalism. Yet modernism's major writers and artists are born and raised during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

The discussion of modernist poetry in history seems at first glance to allow for a model in which poetry, in a specific phase of its development marked as 'modernist', will be situated in the wider context of a series of histories - the 'material' history of events, technologies and relations of production; and the 'cultural' history of ideas, artistic practices, science, education, and so on. In the context of the analysis of the social situation of modernist poetry, however, the term 'history' itself requires unpacking. A specific poem may be judged 'modernist' in terms of its advanced technical features or in terms of the modernity of outlook of the producing poet or implied readership. Underlying such a judgement is something more than the notion that a poem or poet is 'modern' in the sense of 'recent'. The notion of modernism in the arts seems implicitly to rest upon a broader notion of modernity in society. This model - modernism in the arts corresponding to modernity in society - already seems conveniently to present something of which a history might be written, a promising set of correspondences between social realities and artistic practices. The cultural historicism of contemporary scholarship will commonly present accounts which depend in one way or another on this paradigm. However, history too belongs to modernity and is a product of it. History can be set alongside poetry and need not be granted instant analytic priority as something which contains poetry, or to which poetry in some simple sense belongs.

Henry IV in Kent

On 27 February 1623, Edward Dering noted in his “Book of expenses” a payment of 4 shillings to “Mr Carington for writing out the play of King Henry IV” at a rate of 1½ pence per sheet. Edward, then a young man of twenty-five, recently widowed, was living at his family home in Surrenden in Kent and had a passion for plays. He regularly went to the theatre in London and caught performances by companies on tour in Kent. He bought plays at an extraordinary rate: over fifty a year, including, on 5 December 1623, the first recorded purchases of the Shakespeare First Folio as well as a copy of the Works of Ben Jonson. He also organized amateur productions at his home, often buying multiple copies of a play for the purpose, casting other members of his family and neighbours and their servants, including, for a proposed production of John Fletcher's The Spanish Curate, “Jack of the buttery.”

But the payment to the rector of the nearby parish of Wootton for copying out Henry IV was different. Dering could have bought a number of copies of the fifth quarto of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1, published in 1613, or of the only published version of Henry IV Part 2. He certainly had at least one of each of these books. He chose not to buy more. He chose, too, not to produce one or the other play. Instead he saw the two plays as parts of a single whole and created his own version of both plays, conflating them into a single work, cutting scenes and characters and whole sections of the plot completely, adding a few bridge passages and adjustments consequent on the cuts or the problems of the printed texts, making a new, briefer, different Shakespeare play.

From grand opera to hip-hop, the language, narratives, dramatis personae, and mythology of Shakespeare's works have served as resources of musical inspiration since their earliest performances and publication. Composers and songwriters have quoted from the plays and poems, have alluded to them, and have recycled them in ways that regularly call into question accepted divisions between serious and popular culture; between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow artifacts; between mass-market and minority or emergent expression. In this essay, after briefly surveying Shakespeare's presence in musical theatre and other forms of popular music since the mid twentieth century, I will focus on the pivotal role of Shakespeare's Ophelia in marking and inspiring popular culture's enduring investment in Shakespearean texts. In Hamlet and in responses to the plays, Ophelia is implicated in materials that engage with societal concerns involving gender, generational conflict, racial identity, and sexuality.

Such concerns may still seem to speak more to our own times than to Shakespeare's; Terence Hawkes has connected this view of historicity with a residual tendency to set Shakespeare away from (and to set him “above”) popular, non-elite concerns, while also asserting his “eternal relevance” to the maintenance of the status quo. This tendency, however, did not fully emerge until the nineteenth century, although it grew more pronounced over time. Throughout the early twentieth century, Shakespeare continued to be shifted away from any categorization as popular entertainment: Lawrence Levine has charted the split as applied to Shakespeare specifically in United States culture into the categories of “highbrow” and “lowbrow”; some of the same dynamics, however, can be seen at work throughout Britain and Western Europe. Interestingly enough, a similar shift occurred mid-century with jazz music, which had once been dismissed as the lowest of the low by mainstream arbiters, as well as elite ones.