SOURCE: “Recent Books on Narrative Theory: An Essay-Review,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, Autumn, 1987, pp. 559–70.

In the following excerpt, Raval offers a positive assessment of The Content of the Form.

Contemporary narrative theory is concerned with the analysis of narrative discourse and narrativity in order to explain the many forms and structures of storytelling in world literature and their implications. It also focuses on possible relations existing among mythic, historical, and fictional narratives, and it reflects on the possibility and implications of reconceptualizing these relations for literary, cultural, and historiographic theory. The books under review here are too diverse to allow for an integrated account that would make possible a hierarchical or some other larger context in which to place precisely and without distortion the theory presented, or the theories criticized, by each of the books in relation to one another. My attempt in the limited space...