The intellectual activity, as well as the practical and organizational skills (think of those unruly authors to be brought into line), involved in the compilation of a handbook have to excite admiration: it implies the magisterial capacity to overview and discipline a field; it implies indeed that there is a distinct field of activity there to be overviewed and disciplined. It aims/claims to be authoritative. As editor of the Cambridge companion to narrative, Herman takes up the challenge, providing a crisply structured and accessible compendium of current thinking about narrative, pleasingly coherent in style given the diversity of contributors. He suggests a range of readerships and of ways to read the volume. I approach it from the perspective of a student of oral narrative.

In their introductory, programmatic chapters, Herman and Marie-Laure Ryan provide definitional accounts of the development of narrative theory, in particular being careful to disengage the study of narrative from that of literary fiction (more on this later). Both chapters sketch out a semiotic approach to narrative decoupled from fiction, recognizing the existence of narrative in a range of media (written, spoken, visual, gestural, embodied) and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. We see echoes of the narrative project initially laid out by Barthes in Image, music, text (Reference Barthes1977), though perhaps even Barthes would have been surprised by the extent to which, in the meantime, narrative and narrativity have saturated the human sciences and indeed everyday talk, risking at times the vitiation of the construct: if everything is a story, how can one make it the subject of serious intellectual inquiry? (This point is well made at the beginning of Ryan's chapter.)

Herman and Ryan address this issue squarely in their chapters, teasing out definitions of narrative, as much in terms of what narrative is not as what it is. Quoted by both for example is Jerome Bruner's distinction between the modes of narrative and argumentative logico-deductive reasoning. In argumentative (or is it narrative) mode I wanted to interject: “Hey, but what about narrative in argumentation and argumentation through narrative, the mixes and blends of modes, that make narrative such a truly pervasive phenomenon?” Herman situates the volume historically, using a distinction between classical and postclassical approaches, while Ryan concentrates on definitional questions, exploring broad and narrow definitions of narrative, then concluding, as have many linguists before her, that the object of study is a fuzzy category.

Part 2 is described as a starter-kit for studying narrative fiction, with a sequence of well-structured short chapters on story, plot and narration (H. Porter Abbott), time and space (Teresa Bridgeman), character (Uri Margolin), dialogue (Bronwen Thomas), focalization (Manfred Jahn), and genre (Heta Pyrhönen). Disappointingly, for this reader at least, narrative is in this section robustly recoupled with fiction as all of the discussion and exemplification is drawn from novels and short stories. Don't get me wrong, I see immense benefits for the student of oral narrative in becoming familiar with the key ideas in literary narrative theory, and each chapter is a lucid presentation of its theme. I do, however, think it would have strengthened the case made in the first two chapters if this core review of constructs had drawn on a wider range of narrative sources, as is programmatically suggested in the framing chapters. Newspaper reporting, for example, would have yielded many of the features discussed in these chapters, as I realized when reading, at the same time as this volume, extracts from Alistair Cooke's Reporting America: The life of the nation 1946–2004. Many of the narrative features discussed were also in evidence in Cooke's reportage, for example, the shift from internal to external focalization at a key moment in his poignant account of the assassination of Robert Kennedy: “Down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb.”

As if in dialogic response to this criticism, Part 3 is dedicated to narrative in a range of other nonliterary media: conversational spoken language (Neal R. Norrick), drama (Brian Richardson), film and television (Jason Mittell), and digital media (Nick Montfort). In his focus on conversational narrative, Norrick emphasizes the joint or co-construction of narrative, focussing at some length on the notion of tellability. Richardson, in his consideration of narrative and performance, brings in the embodied dimension of narrative. Mittell's chapter on film and television narrative dwells at length on the material affordances (not his term) of visual/verbal as opposed to purely verbal media. Here one begins to engage interestingly with issues of what narrative theory of the type intimated by Barthes might look like. Montfort's chapter on narrative and digital media takes the discussion further into the blending and interaction of narrative with computer gaming, interestingly stretching the definitional issues raised in the framing chapters of the volume. When he writes of “multi-player interactional fictions” (183), there is a potential linkage back to the literary in the form of such high modernist experimental novels themselves anticipating hypertext as Cortazar's Rayuela (which tellingly translates as Hopscotch), inviting the reader explicitly to construct their own order of reading for the text, treating the text in effect like a game of hopscotch. I would like to have seen more time spent on such potential cross-genre relationships, transgressing “pure” narrative categories, and less on the core treatment of narrative in fiction.

Part 4 treats a series of what might be called “hot” theoretical issues in narrative studies: gender (Ruth Page), rhetoric/ethical approaches (James Phelan), ideology (Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck), language (Michael Toolan), cognition, emotion, and consciousness (David Herman), and identity/alterity (Monika Fludernik). Again, perhaps by now unsurprisingly, exemplification of these issues is entirely drawn from fiction. By this point anyway, I had as a reader accepted and even begun to enjoy the literary focus in the work. It is interesting to see Algirdas Greimas's actantial analysis set to work to account for the cross-gendering of Angela Carter's New Eve as it is in the discussion of ideology by Herman & Vervaeck. “Classic” narrative theorists such as Greimas, Barthes, and Gerard Genette and indeed William Labov and Joshua Waletzky are definitely alive and well in these pages. Toolan provides a flavor of what functional linguistics can offer the stylistician, with analyses of transitivity and free indirect thought applied to James Joyce's Two gallants, while Joyce's The dead was trawled by Herman for insights into the representation of consciousness through speech representation and other means. I was methodologically intrigued by Herman's discussion (250–51) of paraphrase as a means of interrogating literary texts. Fludernik's treatment of identity/alterity, the final chapter in the volume, explores the point that identity always implies otherness. I wonder how this can be related to approaches to identity that emphasize positioning: that identity, as Le Page and Tabouret Keller (Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985) so insightfully made clear, involves both affilation (where we place ourselves) and ascription (where others place us). Perhaps this is another take on the identity/alterity relationship, yet one that could also bring into more productive dialogue approaches to narrative analysis derived from oral narrative and those from fictional sources.

While reading this volume I was not immune from idle ongoing meta-reflections on the narrative theories presented, perhaps inevitably, given the above comments, in relation to the literary/nonliterary focus of the analyses. It seemed to me, for example, that many of the literary analyses focused more or less explicitly on reading narrative, rather than on constructing it. Time and again I noted phrases like: “the kind of close reading that feminist narratology promotes” (190); “how readers interpret particular textual details (245); “the path followed by readers as they build up a model of the characters' minds on the basis of textual cues” (251). Even chapters that start with a focus on the writer's rhetorical or linguistic strategies, such as Phelan and Toolan's, quite soon shift to characterize the interpretative strategies of the reader. This is strikingly in contrast with the emphasis of Norrick on the construction/co-construction of oral narrative, for example, in relation to the issue of tellability. If this is the case, and fictional narrative studies tend to focus more on reception, while oral narrative studies highlight narrative production, why is it so and what does it tell us about the affordances of different narrative media?

Towards the end of the volume, Herman restates its programmatic basis in relation to the theme of his chapter: “representations of minds are fundamental to stories, and can be found in cinematic narratives, instances of face-to-face storytelling, written literary texts and other narrative modes,” concluding that “the ideas discussed in this chapter need to be brought into dialogue with those developed by the contributors in Part III of the volume” (257). This is tantamount to an admission that the ambitious interdisciplinary project sketched out at the beginning of the volume is only partly addressed here and that its realization still has some way to go. While not quite achieving its overarching aims, this is nevertheless an excellent introduction to and overview of literary approaches to the study of narrative with interesting pointers towards future interdisciplinary work.