Narrative

Narrative

A narrative (or story) is any account that presents connected events, and may be organized into various categories: non-fiction (i.e. New Journalism, creative non-fiction, biographies, and historiography); fictionalized accounts of historical events (i.e. anecdotes, myths and legends); and fiction proper (i.e. literature in prose, such as short stories and novels, and sometimes in poetry and drama, although in drama the events are primarily being shown instead of told). Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity and art, including speech, writing, songs, film, television, video games, photography, theatre, and visual arts such as painting, with the modern art movements refusing the narrative in favour of the abstract and conceptual) that describes a sequence of events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".

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Famous quotes containing the word narrative:

    The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn’t imagine ourselves through a day without it.
    Robert Coover (b. 1932)

    To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.
    —E.M. (Edward Morgan)