Introduction: Towards a Diachronic Narratology

1 Why Diachronic Narratology?

Classical narratology from the 1950s up to the 1980s was focused on identifying the formal properties, categorial distinctions, and taxonomies peculiar to narrative. While this approach brought welcome theoretical rigor to the analysis of narrative structures in their specificity, it increasingly came to be seen as decontextualizing narratives from their cultural setting and eluding questions crucial to their historical evolution. In the late 1980s, there thus began to emerge a transformation of the structural paradigm into the pluralistic “new narratologies” that coalesced around “postclassical narratology” (Herman 1999), later apostrophized as “hyphenated narratologies” and ordered into an eight-part typology (Nünning and Nünning 2002). Among the new narratologies, postcolonial narratology and feminist or gendered narratology gained particular prominence, for they pointed the way to a more culturally and historically aware form of narratological practice. The experience of the past twenty years, however, shows that the new approaches have not lived up to the demands of more precise text analysis due to their concentration on thematic and ideological concerns. In the new narratologies, even in their less ideological cognitive and reception-oriented forms, the historical development and cultural diversity of narrative have yet to be adequately explored.

The aim of this Handbook of Diachronic Narratology is to take steps toward remedying this deficiency by examining the evolution of specific narrative devices within the framework of various cultures, periods, and genres.

Each of the contributions to this handbook examine two or more narrative traditions within the context of two or more epochs of a given culture. Underlying this approach is the idea that narratology adopts a supracultural frame of reference. In contrast to intercultural approaches that situate narratological study “between” cultures, attending to “exchanges” between cultures, a supracultural narratology occupies a position “above” national cultures, literatures, and periods. In this way, narratology is better positioned to observe transhistorical regularities and developmental tendencies peculiar to narratives in their culture-specific manifestations and evolutions.

Such a narratology, being both diachronic and supracultural, may well produce findings that will draw the attention of specialists in cultural studies (Kulturwissenschaften). However, this narratology will maintain a disciplinary autonomy, specificity, and attention to detail that are lacking in the expansive concept of culture embraced by cultural studies.

Motivation is one example of a narratological concept that is of potential interest for specialists in cultural studies. An eminently culture-sensitive phenomenon such as this enables us to take stock of the mindset that prevails during a particular period and how it develops in various national and historical contexts. Thus, in periods such as the Christian Middle Ages, where expectations of divine salvation and teleological thinking are prominent, structuring techniques such as “motivation from behind” or “final motivation” tend to stand out. In modernism, which is critical of realism, the motivations of realist fiction become intertwined with elements of mythical motivation. The avant-garde after modernism, by contrast, celebrates unconventional rules of motivation that question and destabilize the norms of realist fiction.

2 The Heuristic Starting Point

Little is known as yet about the historical development of the categories and principles that modern narratology, in its synchronic bias, uncritically takes to be universal and valid for narratives throughout the ages. To be sure, narratological studies of works prior to the modern period have been undertaken, but the time now seems ripe to address questions that can be most profitably approached through a properly diachronic narratology in response to Monika Fludernik’s call (2003) for the “diachronization of narratology.” Starting from which period was the narrator perceived as an entity separate from the author, and how did this distinction evolve in the various national literatures? When did techniques for the representation of consciousness through the mixing of narrator voice and character voice, such as free indirect discourse, emerge, and how are these techniques conditioned over time by the grammatical and stylistic markers of one language or another? How is the gradual movement from sacred to secular worldview from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century reflected in the form and function of narrative sequence in the Romance literatures? These are but some of the questions addressed by the contributions to this handbook, and a mere taste of the many dimensions of a more comprehensive diachronic narratology that remain to be explored by future scholarship.

In contrast to historical narratology, which examines narratives and narrative devices synchronically within their specific historical and social contexts (von Contzen and Tilg 2019), diachronic narratology is interested in the historical emergence and evolution of devices and techniques in selected corpuses. While historical narratology draws attention to the unstable dividing line between author and narrator in a tale by Chaucer or between external and internal focalization in a Homeric epic (as shown by von Contzen und Tilg in their contribution to this volume), diachronic narratology will view such cases as individual instances within a series of narratives in their historical development.

The handbook contains no entries that are devoted entirely to genres such as the Greek novel or the Renaissance novella. The emphasis remains on narrative techniques and devices in their historical evolution, referring to genre only when textual phenomena can be adequately examined in the light of generic considerations.

3 The Design of the Handbook

When in early 2018 the editors of this handbook sent invitations to narratologists to participate in the undertaking, not everyone accepted. One reason for this was that some had never before worked on diachronic aspects of narrative. The difficulty of the task, which was new to many, was also evident in the fact that about one third of the contributions originally proposed were never submitted. To complicate things further, a number of withdrawals were brought about by the public health crisis that swept across the globe while the book was under preparation, leaving little time for finding suitable replacements.

These circumstances lie behind a number of the gaps that readers are sure to find in this handbook. On the other hand, it was never the aim of the editors to achieve a comprehen­sive coverage of a subject so vast as diachronic narratology. Nevertheless, the handbook offers a wide spectrum of exploratory studies bearing on specific and clearly defined narrative techniques and devices as they have developed in various national traditions across different periods. This, it is hoped, will provide an attractive framework for further research in the burgeoning field of diachronic narratology.

4 The Structure of the Entries

In exploring the diachronic dimension of narrative techniques, the individual en­­tries proceed in the following manner. Each entry focuses on one particular narratological category, offers a succinct working definition, and applies this definition to the practical analysis of concrete examples from one particular culture and language and from two different periods. In accordance with the explorative design of the handbook, the individual entries refrain from entering into extensive discussions of the conceptual history of the narratological terms in question, and they also refrain from presenting an overview of previous research on the literary examples drawn on. The particular definition of the respective category is always the author’s own and may differ partly from other approaches. For reasons of space, primary sources are generally cited by author and/or title only. Quotations from literary works in languages other than English are translated into English. The original is quoted in addition to the English translation only if the wording itself is relevant for the argumentation. Own translations are marked by an asterisk.

References

Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “The Diachronization of Narratology.” Narrative 11, no. 3, 331–348. 

Herman, David. 1999. “Introduction: Narratologies.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, 1–30. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. →

Nünning, Ansgar,...