The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, published under the editorship David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, is more than a new dictionary of narratology. (1) It is an unprecedented work that defines and examines thousands of terms and concepts, distributed in four hundred fifty articles and related to narrative in all its forms and in all the variety of its media, formats, periods, genres, and subgenres. This innovative encyclopedia concerns students, teachers, and researchers, all those who recognize “the very predominance of narrative as a focus of interest across multiple disciplines” (x), whether in history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, discourse analysis, or literary studies. However, we might consider whether the notion of “theory” here is likely to be a simple metaphor. The list of articles in this very rich volume can be easily divided in historical accounts (on schools or trends, such as the “Tel Aviv School of Narrative Poetics”), methodological accounts (on the different approaches to narrative, from “Computational Approaches to Narrative” to approaches more inspired by the humanities), or lexical accounts (on concepts or notions, more or less linked to the original terminology of such and such author), all accounts of varying length. The volume also contains the presentation of problems, old and new, from plot structure to the literary representation of thought and consciousness, that feed theoretical reflection on narrative. (2) The editors chose not to devote articles to individual theoreticians (but the bio-bibliographic information concerning them can be accessed through the index).

The ambition of the Encyclopedia is not only to present the history, the conceptual and methodological tools, and the terminology of narrative theory or “narrative studies” but first and foremost to underline its importance and topical interest. Apprehending two new phenomena was the main focus for the editors in their work. The first one is well known in the Anglo-Saxon world as the “narrative turn.” In the last twenty years this transformation has put the problematics of narrative at the center of not only historical, ethnographical, and psychoanalytical thought, but also juridical, political, and even medical, thus endowing narrative theory the status of a new paradigm for knowledge theory. In the article “Narrative Turn in the Humanities,” Martin Kreiswirth gives an extensive, rigorous, and well-informed presentation of this phenomenon. His article also contains a number of cross-references to the index or to other entries in the volume (see in particular “Ethnographic Approaches to Narrative,” “Historiography,” “Law and Narrative,” “Medicine and Narrative,” “Psychoanalysis and Narrative”). The “narrative turn” and the new uses it defines for the word “story” also form the subject of the first part of Ryan’s article “Narrative,” which I will come back to. The second phenomenon is the renaissance of narratology in a plural, diversified form: Narratologies, significantly, is the title of a collective work published in 1999 under the direction of David Herman. In the introduction to this work, David Herman proposes the term “postclassical narratology,” taken up in Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s article, “in order to group the various efforts to transcend ‘classical’ structuralist narratology, which has been reproached for its scientificity, anthropomorphism, disregard for context, and gender-blindness” (450; also see the entries “Implied Reader,” “Narrative,” “Natural Narratolology,” “Cultural Studies Approaches to Narrative,” “Gender Studies,” and “Feminist Narratology”). However, one can wonder, when reading some of the articles in the Encyclopedia (”Education and Narrative,” “Medicine and Narrative,” “Narrative Psychology,” “Narrative Therapy,” “Theology and Narrative,” all of great interest on their own), if the encounter of certain disciplines of the “narrative turn” with the new narratology, with its postclassical and poststructuralist features, is just due to circumstances and if it does not derive from an editorial strategy rather than a true synergy.