Narrative (journal)

Narrative provides a forum for rigorous scholarship on how stories are structured, interpreted, transmitted, and understood. Its central field is narrative theory, but its contents extend beyond formalist analysis to include narratology, literary history, rhetoric, reader response, and cognitive approaches to storytelling.¹ The journal publishes articles, review essays, and reviews addressing narrative in fiction, poetry, drama, life writing, and other cultural forms.

The journal’s remit reflects the broadening of narrative studies since the late twentieth century. Research may examine such subjects as voice, focalization, temporality, plot, unreliable narration, genre, and the relationship between narrative and ethics. Rather than defining narrative as the property of literature alone, the journal treats it as a form that can be studied across disciplines and media when the argument remains grounded in sustained scholarly analysis.

Narrative was established in 1993 as a journal associated with the expanding international field of narrative studies.² The journal is connected with the International Society for the Study of Narrative, a scholarly organization that supports research, conferences, and exchange among specialists in narrative.³ Its publication history belongs to a period when narratology was moving from a primarily structural analysis of literary texts toward more diverse historical, rhetorical, cognitive, and interdisciplinary methods.

The journal is published by Wiley on behalf of the society and is available through institutional and other licensed scholarly access routes.¹ Bibliographic records identify it by the print ISSN 1063-3685 and the electronic ISSN 1538-3631.⁴ These identifiers distinguish the journal from books, conference proceedings, and other publications that use the general word “narrative” in their titles.

Narrative brings together several methods because the study of storytelling involves both textual form and acts of interpretation. Articles may use close reading, historical research, comparative literature, rhetorical analysis, archival evidence, or concepts drawn from cognitive science and psychology. The journal’s subject range includes traditional literary narrative as well as autobiography, historiography, popular culture, and narrative forms shaped by changing media.

Recurring analytical questions concern who speaks, whose perspective organizes a text, how events are ordered, and how readers or audiences construct meaning. Such questions connect the journal to debates about unreliable narration, narrative ethics, authorship, genre, and the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Its interdisciplinary orientation does not erase distinctions among methods: literary arguments generally remain accountable to textual detail, historical context, and explicit theoretical claims.

The journal’s less visible significance lies in its role as a meeting point between specialized narrative theory and neighboring disciplines. Its subject is not limited to novels or to the “story” component of a work; scholarship can address discourse, framing, mediation, audience, and the institutional conditions under which narratives circulate. This makes the journal relevant to researchers studying life writing, digital media, testimony, film, and the narrative dimensions of law or history.

Another notable feature is the coexistence of theoretical and historically specific work. A study of a narrative device in a particular author or period can appear alongside an article testing a broader model of narrative cognition or interpretation. Readers therefore encounter both abstract debates and case studies. The journal’s record is indexed in major scholarly discovery systems, allowing its articles to function as part of the wider research infrastructure of literary studies rather than as a publication aimed at general literary reviewing.¹⁴

Narratology

The systematic study of narrative structures, techniques, functions, and modes of interpretation.

Focalization

The regulation of narrative information through a particular perspective or field of perception.

Unreliable narration

Narration whose account is limited, misleading, contradictory, or otherwise not fully trustworthy.

Life writing

Writing concerned with lived experience, including autobiography, memoir, diaries, and related forms.