Customer Reviews

A Dictionary of Narratology

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This is a highly useful dictionary. Although its entries total to just over 100 pages, it is remarkably complete. Prince offers short, to the point explanations of terms that in other dictionaries are notoriously fuzzy explained. Moreover, he provides a very helpful set of crossreferences that goes with each entry, thus enabling the reader to find out more. Among the outstanding explanations is the description of point-of-view, in which Prince sets forth the proposals of Friedman, Genette and Stanzel complete in just two pages. Useful bibliographical references substitute for the fact that Prince could not adress every controversial discussion in full. Everyone interested in literary theory should own a copy, even if the work was not updated to take aboard recent developments.

Although I agree with others who claim that this book is essential to those studying narrative, I disagree with respect to its quality. This IS a necessary volume, in that there are many terms specific to narratology that cannot be found elsewhere in the format of a literary dicitionary. This is a very specific way of approaching literature, so naturally its vocabulary is unique. Owning this book can in many instances save hours of study within other tomes.

HOWEVER, the quality of the definitions themselves vary greatly. Many definitions are fantastic, and very complete. They take into account the views of more than one theorist, and that's great. In fact some definitions take up to 3 pages, but other terms are so minimally defined that one is essentially referred to another term in the book, and that's it. And although the bibliography is very complete, it is not annotated.

So the bad news is that if you're a student, you're still going to need to do a lot of reading (especially of those books mentioned in the bibliography) and cull through that info to get to a good working definition of some terms. You may want to consider the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Criticism in addition to this book; that one will certainly save time, but it is not geared toward narratology specifically, so you will need both books.

All in all, if you're a professor or student of graduate level English, you do need this book. Just don't expect the heavens to part once you've bought it.