Abstract

Narration, the telling of stories, is and has always been a universal, world-spanning phenomenon, “a panglobal fact of culture”. Instead of describing a “global turn” of narration, this chapter focuses on the pronounced interest in narration within a multitude of academic disciplines since the 1990s, which understand narration as an anthropologically determined and global form of perceiving and knowing the world and the self. It further goes into the resulting approaches for the analysis of narration within the field of cultural narratology, and, finally, considers transcultural narratology, which examines the question of how meaning is narratively produced and constructed in different cultures and which values are attached to it.