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Article: Narratives
- Article from:
- International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
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Narratives
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Whether defined in literature, law, philosophy, or the social sciences, narrative has generally been understood as a form of accounting or representing events in language, whether these are real or fictitious, and in a manner that suggests a causal relation between each event. Two of the earliest theories of narrative occur in Plato
’
s
Republic
and Aristotle
’
s
Poetics
, both philosophers being concerned with the role of narrative in mimesis. Where Plato (c.427
–
347BCE) distinguishes between mimesis and diegesis, with the latter requiring the poet to speak in his own name rather than in another
’
s voice, Aristotle (c. 384
–
322 BCE) ...