This two-volume study traces developments in English narrative structure from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, building on the theses set out in Monika Fludernik’s award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996).

Developments in Narrative Structure analyzes the medieval verse and prose romance, verse and prose hagiography, the fabliau, historical writing, letters, the early modern romance and low-style prose as well as the epic. Deploying linguistic and narratological methodology, the study provides a wide-ranging survey of how narrative develops and diversifies during these five centuries. It discusses continuities and discontinuities, as well as functional repurposing of familiar strategies, and traces the complex and often contradictory changes in form and function. The analyses moreover allow for a comparison between developments in verse and prose texts from a chronological as well as intergeneric perspective.

This authoritative work is an invaluable resource for literary scholars, linguists, and especially to narratologists and scholars of historical pragmatics. Among literature specialists, it will be of interest to literary historians, medievalists, early modern scholars, and for those interested in the rise of the novel and its antecedents.