Medicine is concerned with the most intimate aspects of private life. Yet it is also a focus for diverse forms of public organization and action. In this volume, an international team of scholars use the techniques of medical history to analyse the changing boundaries and constitution of the public sphere from early modernity to the present day.

What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? What features turn a discourse into a narrative text? This book turns its attention to these and other questions. Narrative Fiction is organized around issues - such as events, time, focalization, characterization, narration the text and its reading - rather than individual theorists or approaches. In following such a course, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan addresses key approaches to narrative fiction, from New Criticism to Phenomenology, but also offers views on and modifications to these theories. While...