Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A long-standing interest in what stories Byzantines told and heard, wrote, and read has in recent years been wedded to an emerging interest in how they crafted and shaped those stories. Scholars and students of Byzantine literature have increasingly pursued the contribution of narrative form to the meaning or effect of stories, sacred and secular. Cities fall and emperors die out of “proper” sequence, but in keeping with the narrative unity of texts; time dilates in the story of a saint's life, expanding and contracting in accordance with the instructive or even entertaining potential of the event recounted; narrators nestle their stories in elaborate layers of hearsay. Variously and summarily relegated to mere “technique,” such important features of story-organization are as much a part of the information they purport to communicate as any character or putative event. An appreciation of the contribution of formal order to an understanding of a story is indispensable. “Narrative” may thus be used to designate formal features of design and arrangement of stories, a systematic analysis of those aspects of storytelling which otherwise may go unnamed or unnoticed even as they act upon a reader's or listener's imagination.So pronounced has been the recent curiosity about narrative features of texts, and so revealing the systematic investigation of questions about voice, perspective, ... log in or subscribe to read full text