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**Alternate history**, **alternative history** (in Commonwealth English), or simply **althist**, sometimes abbreviated as **AH**, is a genre of speculative fiction consisting of stories in which one or more historical events occur differently. These stories usually contain "what if" scenarios at crucial points in history and present outcomes other than those in the historical record. The stories are conjectural but are sometimes based on fact. Alternate history has been seen as a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, or historical fiction; alternate history works may use tropes from any or all of these genres. Another term occasionally used for the genre is "allohistory" (literally "other history").

Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has, to a large extent, merged with science fiction tropes involving time travel between alternate histories, psychic awareness of the existence of one universe by the people in another, or time travel that results in history splitting into two or more timelines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another.

In Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and Galician, the genre of alternate history is called *uchronie / ucronia / ucronía / Uchronie*, which has given rise to the term *Uchronia* in English. This neologism is based on the prefix ου- (which in Ancient Greek means "not/not any/no") and the Greek χρόνος (*chronos*), meaning "time". A *uchronia* means literally "(in) no time," by analogy to *utopia*, etymologically "(in) no place." This term apparently also inspired the name of the alternate history book list, *uchronia.net*.

## Definition

The *Collins English Dictionary* defines alternative history as "a genre of fiction in which the author speculates on how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had had a different outcome." According to Steven H Silver, an American science fiction editor, alternate history requires three things: a point of divergence from the history of our world prior to the time at which the author is writing, a change that would alter history as it is known, and an examination of the ramifications of that change.

Several genres of fiction have been misidentified as alternate history. Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarke's *2001: A Space Odyssey* (1968) or George Orwell's *Nineteen Eighty-Four* (1949), is not alternate history because the author did not make the choice to change the past at the time of writing. Secret history, which can take the form of fiction or nonfiction, documents events that may or may not have happened historically but did not have an effect on the overall outcome of history, and so is not to be confused with alternate history. and a different definition of "secret history" by the same writer is also searchable. -->

Alternate history is related to, but distinct from, counterfactual history. This term is used by some professional historians to describe the practice of using thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned speculations on "what might have happened if..." as a tool of academic historical research, as opposed to a literary device.

## History of literature

### Antiquity and medieval

The earliest example of alternate (or counterfactual) history is found in Livy's *Ab Urbe Condita Libri* (book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great had survived to attack Europe as he had planned; asking, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in a war with Alexander?" Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander.

Another example of counterfactual history was posited by cardinal and Doctor of the Church Peter Damian in the 11th century. In his famous work *De Divina Omnipotentia*, a long letter in which he discusses God's omnipotence, he treats questions related to the limits of divine power, including the question of whether God can change the past, for example, bringing about that Rome was never founded:

One early work of fiction detailing an alternate history is Joanot Martorell's 1490 epic romance *Tirant lo Blanch*, which was written when the loss of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe. It tells the story of the knight Tirant the White from Brittany who travels to the embattled remnants of the Byzantine Empire. He becomes a Megaduke and commander of its armies and manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of Mehmet II. He saves the city from Islamic conquest, and even chases the Turks deeper into lands they had previously conquered.

### 19th century

One of the earliest works of alternate history published in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be Louis Geoffroy's *Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832)* (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) (1836), which imagines Napoleon's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1811 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule.

In the English language, the first known complete alternate history is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P.'s Correspondence", published in 1845. It recounts the tale of a man who is considered "a madman" due to his perceptions of a different 1845, a reality in which long-dead famous people, such as the poets Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, the actor Edmund Kean, the British politician George Canning, and Napoleon Bonaparte, are still alive.

The first novel-length alternate history in English would seem to be Castello Holford's *Aristopia* (1895). While not as nationalistic as Louis Geoffroy's *Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1823*, *Aristopia* is another attempt to portray a Utopian society. In *Aristopia*, the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef made of solid gold and are able to build a Utopian society in North America.

### Early 20th century and the era of the pulps

n 1905, H. G. Wells published *A Modern Utopia*. As explicitly noted in the book itself, Wells's main aim in writing it was to set out his social and political ideas, the plot serving mainly as a vehicle to expound them. This book introduced the idea of a person being transported from a point in our familiar world to the precise geographical equivalent point in an alternate world, where history had gone differently. The protagonists undergo various adventures in the alternate world, and are then finally transported back to our world - again to the precise geographical equivalent point. Since then, this had become - and remains - a staple of the alternate history genre.

A number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see, for example, Charles Petrie's *If: A Jacobite Fantasy* [1926]). In 1931, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays from some of the leading historians of the period for his anthology *If It Had Happened Otherwise*. In this work, scholars from major universities (as well as important non-academic authors) turned their attention to such questions as "If the Moors in Spain Had Won" and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness". The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loon's fanciful and satiric portrayal of an independent 20th century Dutch city state on the island of Manhattan. Among the authors included were Hilaire Belloc, André Maurois, and Winston Churchill.

One of the entries in Squire's volume was Churchill's "If Lee Had Not Won [*sic*] the Battle of Gettysburg", written from the viewpoint of a historian in a world where the Confederate States of America had won the American Civil War. The entry considers what would have happened if the North had been victorious (in other words, a character from an alternate world imagines a world more like the real one we live in, although not identical in every detail). Speculative work that narrates from the point of view of an alternate history is variously known as "recursive alternate history", a "double-blind what-if", or an "alternate-alternate history". Churchill's essay was one of the influences behind Ward Moore's alternate history novel *Bring the Jubilee*,[*citation needed*] in which General Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg, paving the way for the eventual victory of the Confederacy in the American Civil War (named the "War of Southron Independence" in this timeline). The protagonist, autodidact Hodgins Backmaker, travels back to the aforementioned battle and inadvertently changes history, resulting in the emergence of our own timeline and the consequent victory of the Union instead.

American humorist author James Thurber parodied alternate history stories about the American Civil War in his 1930 story "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", which he accompanied with this very brief introduction: "*Scribner's* magazine is publishing a series of three articles: 'If Booth Had Missed Lincoln', 'If Lee Had Won the Battle of Gettysburg', and 'If Napoleon Had Escaped to America'. This is the fourth."

Another example of alternate history from this period (and arguably the first to explicitly posit cross-time travel from one universe to another as anything more than a visionary experience) is H.G. Wells' *Men Like Gods* (1923), in which London-based journalist Mr. Barnstable along with two cars and their passengers is mysteriously teleported into "another world", which the "Earthlings" call Utopia. Being far more advanced than Earth, Utopia is some three thousand years ahead of humanity in its development. Wells describes a multiverse of alternative worlds, complete with the paratime travel machines that would later become popular with US pulp writers. However, since his hero experiences only a single alternate world, this story is not very different from conventional alternate history.

In the 1930s, alternate history moved into a new arena. The December 1933 issue of *Astounding* published Nat Schachner's "Ancestral Voices", which was quickly followed by Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time". While earlier alternate histories examined reasonably straightforward divergences, Leinster attempted something completely different. In his "World gone mad", pieces of Earth traded places with their analogs from different timelines. The story follows Professor Minott and his students from a fictitious Robinson College as they wander through analogues of worlds that followed a different history.

A somewhat similar approach was taken by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 novelette *Elsewhen*, in which a professor trains his mind to move his body across timelines. He then hypnotizes his students so they can explore more of them. Eventually each settles into the reality most suitable for him or her. Some of the worlds they visit are mundane, some very odd; others follow science fiction or fantasy conventions.

World War II produced alternate history for propaganda: both British and American authors wrote works depicting Nazi invasions of their respective countries as cautionary tales.

### Time travel as a means of creating historical divergences

The period around World War II also saw the publication of the time travel novel *Lest Darkness Fall* by L. Sprague de Camp, in which an American academic travels to Italy at the time of the Byzantine invasion of the Ostrogoths. De Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, is depicted as making permanent historical changes and implicitly forming a new time branch, thereby making the work an alternate history.

Time travel as the cause of a point of divergence (POD), which can denote either the bifurcation of a historical timeline or a simple replacement of the future that existed before the time traveling event, has continued to be a popular theme. In Ward Moore's *Bring the Jubilee*, the protagonist lives in an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the American Civil War; he travels backward through time, and brings about a Union victory in the Battle of Gettysburg.

When a story's assumptions about the nature of time travel lead to the complete replacement of the visited time's future rather than just the creation of an additional time line, the device of a "time patrol" is often used where guardians move through time to preserve the "correct" history.

A more recent example is *Making History* by Stephen Fry, in which a time machine is used to alter history so that Adolf Hitler was never born. This ironically results in a more competent leader of the Third Reich, resulting in the country's ascendancy and longevity in this altered timeline.

### Cross-time stories

H.G. Wells' "cross-time" or "many universes" variant (see above) was fully developed by Murray Leinster in his 1934 short story "Sidewise in Time", in which sections of the Earth's surface begin changing places with their counterparts in alternate timelines.

Fredric Brown employed this subgenre to satirize the science fiction pulps and their adolescent readers—and fears of foreign invasion—in the classic *What Mad Universe* (1949). In Clifford D. Simak's *Ring Around the Sun* (1953), the hero ends up in an alternate earth of thick forests in which humanity never developed but a band of mutants is establishing a colony; the story line appears to frame the author's anxieties regarding McCarthyism and the Cold War.

### Quantum theory of many worlds

While many justifications for alternate histories involve a multiverse, the "many world" theory would naturally involve many worlds, in fact a continually exploding array of universes. In quantum theory, new worlds would proliferate with every quantum event, and even if the writer uses human decisions, every decision that could be made differently would result in a different timeline. A writer's fictional multiverse may, in fact, preclude some decisions as humanly impossible, as when, in *Night Watch*, Terry Pratchett depicts a character informing Vimes that while anything that can happen, has happened, nevertheless there is no history whatsoever in which Vimes has ever murdered his wife. When the writer explicitly maintains that *all* possible decisions are made in all possible ways, one possible conclusion is that the characters were neither brave, nor clever, nor skilled, but simply lucky enough to happen on the universe in which they did not choose the cowardly route, take the stupid action, fumble the crucial activity, etc.; few writers focus on this idea, although it has been explored in stories such as Larry Niven's story *All the Myriad Ways*, where the reality of all possible universes leads to an epidemic of suicide and crime because people conclude their choices have no moral import.

In any case, even if it is true that every possible outcome occurs in some world, it can still be argued that traits such as bravery and intelligence might still affect the relative frequency of worlds in which better or worse outcomes occurred (even if the total number of worlds with each type of outcome is infinite, it is still possible to assign a different measure to different infinite sets). The physicist David Deutsch, a strong advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, has argued along these lines, saying that "By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen." This view is perhaps somewhat too abstract to be explored directly in science fiction stories, but a few writers have tried, such as Greg Egan in his short story *The Infinite Assassin*, where an agent is trying to contain reality-scrambling "whirlpools" that form around users of a certain drug, and the agent is constantly trying to maximize the consistency of behavior among his alternate selves, attempting to compensate for events and thoughts he experiences, he guesses are of low measure relative to those experienced by most of his other selves.

Many writers—perhaps the majority—avoid the discussion entirely. In one novel of this type, H. Beam Piper's *Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen*, a Pennsylvania State Police officer, who knows how to make gunpowder, is transported from our world to an alternate universe where the recipe for gunpowder is a tightly held secret and saves a country that is about to be conquered by its neighbors. The paratime patrol members are warned against going into the timelines immediately surrounding it, where the country *will* be overrun, but the book never depicts the slaughter of the innocent thus entailed, remaining solely in the timeline where the country is saved.

The cross-time theme was further developed in the 1960s by Keith Laumer in the first three volumes of his *Imperium* sequence, which would be completed in *Zone Yellow* (1990). Piper's politically more sophisticated variant was adopted and adapted by Michael Kurland and Jack Chalker in the 1980s; Chalker's *G.O.D. Inc* trilogy (1987–89), featuring paratime detectives Sam and Brandy Horowitz, marks the first attempt at merging the paratime thriller with the police procedural.[*citation needed*] Kurland's *Perchance* (1988), the first volume of the never-completed "Chronicles of Elsewhen", presents a multiverse of secretive cross-time societies that utilize a variety of means for cross-time travel, ranging from high-tech capsules to mutant powers. Harry Turtledove has launched the Crosstime Traffic series for teenagers featuring a variant of H. Beam Piper's paratime trading empire.

### Rival paratime worlds

The concept of a cross-time version of a world war, involving rival paratime empires, was developed in Fritz Leiber's Change War series, starting with the Hugo Award winning *The Big Time* (1958); followed by Richard C. Meredith's *Timeliner* trilogy in the 1970s, Michael McCollum's *A Greater Infinity* (1982) and John Barnes' *Timeline Wars* trilogy in the 1990s.

Such "paratime" stories may include speculation that the laws of nature can vary from one universe to the next, providing a science fictional explanation—or veneer—for what is normally fantasy. Aaron Allston's *Doc Sidhe* and *Sidhe Devil* take place between our world, the "grim world" and an alternate "fair world" where the Sidhe retreated to. Although technology is clearly present in both worlds, and the "fair world" parallels our history, about fifty years out of step, there is functional magic in the fair world. Even with such explanation, the more explicitly the alternate world resembles a normal fantasy world, the more likely the story is to be labelled fantasy, as in Poul Anderson's "House Rule" and "Loser's Night". In both science fiction and fantasy, whether a given parallel universe is an alternate history may not be clear. The writer might allude to a POD only to explain the existence and make no use of the concept, or may present the universe without explanation of its existence.

### Major writers explore alternate histories

Isaac Asimov's short story "What If—" (1952) is about a couple who can explore alternate realities by means of a television-like device. This idea can also be found in Asimov's novel *The End of Eternity* (1955), in which the "Eternals" can change the realities of the world, without people being aware of it. Poul Anderson's *Time Patrol* stories feature conflicts between forces intent on changing history and the Patrol who work to preserve it. One story, Delenda Est, describes a world in which Carthage triumphed over the Roman Republic. *The Big Time*, by Fritz Leiber, describes a Change War ranging across all of history.

Keith Laumer's *Worlds of the Imperium* is one of the earliest alternate history novels; it was published by *Fantastic Stories of the Imagination* in 1961, in magazine form, and reprinted by Ace Books in 1962 as one half of an Ace Double. Besides our world, Laumer describes a world ruled by an Imperial aristocracy formed by the merger of European empires, in which the American Revolution never happened, and a third world in post-war chaos ruled by the protagonist's doppelganger.

Philip K. Dick's novel, *The Man in the High Castle* (1962), is an alternate history in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II. This book contains an example of "alternate-alternate" history, in that one of its characters authored a book depicting a reality in which the Allies won the war, itself divergent from real-world history in several aspects. The several characters live within a divided United States, in which the Empire of Japan takes the Pacific states, governing them as a puppet, Nazi Germany takes the East Coast of the United States and parts of the Midwest, with the remnants of the old United States' government as the Neutral Zone, a buffer state between the two superpowers. The book has inspired an Amazon series of the same name.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel, *Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle* (1969), is a story of incest that takes place within an alternate North America settled in part by Czarist Russia and that borrows from Dick's idea of "alternate-alternate" history (the world of Nabokov's hero is wracked by rumors of a "counter-earth" that apparently is ours). Some critics[*who?*] believe that the references to a counter-earth suggest that the world portrayed in *Ada* is a delusion in the mind of the hero (another favorite theme of Dick's novels[*citation needed*]). Strikingly, the characters in *Ada* seem to acknowledge their own world as the copy or negative version, calling it "Anti-Terra", while its mythical twin is the real "Terra". Like history, science has followed a divergent path on Anti-Terra: it boasts all the same technology as our world, but all based on water instead of electricity; e.g., when a character in *Ada* makes a long-distance call, all the toilets in the house flush at once to provide hydraulic power.

Guido Morselli described the defeat of Italy (and subsequently France) in World War I in his novel, *Past Conditional* (1975; *Contro-passato prossimo*), wherein the static Alpine front line which divided Italy from Austria during that war collapses when the Germans and the Austrians forsake trench warfare and adopt blitzkrieg twenty years in advance.

Kingsley Amis set his novel, *The Alteration* (1976), in the 20th century, but major events in the Reformation did not take place, and Protestantism is limited to the breakaway Republic of New England. Martin Luther was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church and later became Pope Germanian I.

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, *The Years of Rice and Salt* (2002), starts at the point of divergence with Timur turning his army away from Europe, and the Black Death has killed 99% of Europe's population, instead of only a third. Robinson explores world history from that point in AD 1405 (807 AH) to about AD 2045 (1467 AH). Rather than following the great man theory of history, focusing on leaders, wars, and major events, Robinson writes more about social history, similar to the Annales School of history theory and Marxist historiography, focusing on the lives of ordinary people living in their time and place.

Philip Roth's novel, *The Plot Against America* (2004), looks at an America where Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in 1940 in his bid for a third term as President of the United States, and Charles Lindbergh is elected, leading to a US that features increasing fascism and anti-Semitism.

Michael Chabon, occasionally an author of speculative fiction, contributed to the genre with his novel *The Yiddish Policemen's Union* (2007), which explores a world in which the State of Israel was destroyed in its infancy and many of the world's Jews instead live in a small strip of Alaska set aside by the US government for Jewish settlement. The story follows a Jewish detective solving a murder case in the Yiddish-speaking semi-autonomous city state of Sitka. Stylistically, Chabon borrows heavily from the noir and detective fiction genres, while exploring social issues related to Jewish history and culture. Apart from the alternate history of the Jews and Israel, Chabon also plays with other common tropes of alternate history fiction; in the book, Germany actually loses the war even *harder* than they did in reality, getting hit with a nuclear bomb instead of just simply losing a ground war (subverting the common "what if Germany won WWII?" trope).

### Contemporary alternate history in popular literature

The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a boom in popular-fiction versions of alternate history, fueled by the emergence of the prolific alternate history author Harry Turtledove, as well as the development of the steampunk genre and two series of anthologies—the *What Might Have Been* series edited by Gregory Benford and the *Alternate ...* series edited by Mike Resnick. This period also saw alternate history works by S. M. Stirling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Harry Harrison, Howard Waldrop, Peter Tieryas, and others.

In 1986, a sixteen-part epic comic book series called *Captain Confederacy* began examining a world where the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War. In the series, the Captain and others heroes are staged government propaganda events featuring the feats of these superheroes.

Since the late 1990s, Harry Turtledove has been the most prolific practitioner of alternate history and has been given the title "Master of Alternate History" by some. His books include those of Timeline 191 (a.k.a. Southern Victory, also known as TL-191), in which, while the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War, the Union and Imperial Germany defeat the Entente Powers in the two "Great War"s of the 1910s and 1940s (with a Nazi-esque Confederate government attempting to exterminate its Black population), and the Worldwar series, in which aliens invaded Earth during World War II. Other stories by Turtledove include *A Different Flesh*, in which America was not colonized from Asia during the last ice age; *In the Presence of Mine Enemies*, in which the Nazis won World War II; and *Ruled Britannia*, in which the Spanish Armada succeeded in conquering England in the Elizabethan era, with William Shakespeare being given the task of writing the play that will motivate the Britons to rise up against their Spanish conquerors. He also co-authored a book with actor Richard Dreyfuss, *The Two Georges*, in which the United Kingdom retained the American colonies, with George Washington and King George III making peace. He did a two-volume series in which the Japanese not only bombed Pearl Harbor but also invaded and occupied the Hawaiian Islands.

Perhaps the most incessantly explored theme in popular alternate history focuses on worlds in which the Nazis won World War Two. In some versions, the Nazis and/or Axis Powers conquer the entire world; in others, they conquer most of the world but a "Fortress America" exists under siege; while in others, there is a Nazi/Japanese Cold War comparable to the US/Soviet equivalent in 'our' timeline. *Fatherland* (1992), by Robert Harris, is set in Europe following the Nazi victory. The novel *Dominion* by C.J. Sansom (2012) is similar in concept but is set in England, with Churchill the leader of an anti-German Resistance and other historic persons in various fictional roles. In the Mecha Samurai Empire series (2016), Peter Tieryas focuses on the Asian-American side of the alternate history, exploring an America ruled by the Japanese Empire while integrating elements of Asian pop culture like mechas and videogames.

Several writers have posited points of departure for such a world but then have injected time splitters from the future or paratime travel, for instance James P. Hogan's *The Proteus Operation*. Norman Spinrad wrote *The Iron Dream* in 1972, which is intended to be a science fiction novel written by Adolf Hitler after fleeing from Europe to North America in the 1920s.

In Jo Walton's "Small Change" series, the United Kingdom made peace with Hitler before the involvement of the United States in World War II, and slowly collapses due to severe economic depression. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen have written a novel, *1945*, in which the US defeated Japan but not Germany in World War II, resulting in a Cold War with Germany rather than the Soviet Union. Gingrich and Forstchen neglected to write the promised sequel; instead, they wrote a trilogy about the American Civil War, starting with *Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War*, in which the Confederates win a victory at the Battle of Gettysburg - however, after Lincoln responds by bringing Grant and his forces to the eastern theater, the Army of Northern Virginia is soon trapped and destroyed in Maryland, and the war ends within weeks. Also from that general era, Martin Cruz Smith, in his first novel, posited an independent American Indian nation following the defeat of Custer in *The Indians Won* (1970).

Beginning with *The Probability Broach* in 1980, L. Neil Smith wrote several novels that postulated the disintegration of the US Federal Government after Albert Gallatin joins the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and eventually leads to the creation of a libertarian utopia.

A recent time traveling splitter variant involves entire communities being shifted elsewhere to become the unwitting creators of new time branches. These communities are transported from the present (or the near-future) to the past or to another time-line via a natural disaster, the action of technologically advanced aliens, or a human experiment gone wrong. S. M. Stirling wrote the *Island in the Sea of Time* trilogy, in which Nantucket Island and all its modern inhabitants are transported to Bronze Age times to become the world's first superpower. In Eric Flint's 1632 series, a small town in West Virginia is transported to 17th century central Europe and drastically changes the course of the Thirty Years' War, which was then underway. John Birmingham's *Axis of Time* trilogy deals with the culture shock when a United Nations naval task force from 2021 finds itself back in 1942 helping the Allies against the Empire of Japan and the Germans (and doing almost as much harm as good in spite of its advanced weapons). Similarly, Robert Charles Wilson's *Mysterium* depicts a failed US government experiment which transports a small American town into an alternative version of the US run by believers in a form of Christianity known as Gnosticism, who are engaged in a bitter war with the "Spanish" in Mexico (the chief scientist at the laboratory where the experiment occurred is described as a Gnostic, and references to Christian Gnosticism appear repeatedly in the book). In *Time for Patriots* by retired astronomer Thomas Wm. Hamilton (4897 Tomhamilton) a town and military academy on Long Island are transported back to 1770, where they shorten the American Revolution, rewrite the Constitution, prolong Mozart's life, battle Barbary pirates, and have other adventures.

Although not dealing in physical time travel, in his alt-history novel *Marx Returns*, Jason Barker introduces anachronisms into the life and times of Karl Marx, such as when his wife Jenny sings a verse from the Sex Pistols's song "Anarchy in the U.K.", or in the games of chess she plays with the Marxes' housekeeper Helene Demuth, which on one occasion involves a Caro–Kann Defence. In her review of the novel, Nina Power writes of "Jenny’s 'utopian' desire for an end to time", an attitude which, according to Power, is inspired by her husband's co-authored book *The German Ideology*. However, in keeping with the novel's anachronisms, the latter was not published until 1932. By contrast, the novel's timeline ends in 1871.

### In the contemporary fantasy genre

Many fantasies and science fantasies are set in a world that has a history somewhat similar to our own world, but with magic added. Some posit points of divergence, but some also feature magic altering history all along. One example of a universe that is in part historically recognizable but also obeys different physical laws is Poul Anderson's *Three Hearts and Three Lions* in which the Matter of France is history, and the fairy folk are real and powerful. A partly familiar European history for which the author provides a point of divergence is Randall Garrett's "Lord Darcy" series: a monk systemizing magic rather than science, so the use of foxglove to treat heart disease is called superstition. The other great point of divergence in this timeline occurs in 1199, when Richard the Lionheart survives the Siege of Chaluz and returns to England, making the Angevin Empire so strong it survives into the 20th century.

*Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell* takes place in an alternative version of England where a separate Kingdom ruled by the Raven King and founded on magic existed in Northumbria for over 300 years. In Patricia Wrede's Regency fantasies, Great Britain has a Royal Society of Wizards, and in Poul Anderson's *A Midsummer Tempest* William Shakespeare is remembered as the Great Historian, with the novel itself taking place in the era of Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, with an alternate outcome for the English Civil War and an earlier Industrial Revolution.

*The Tales of Alvin Maker* series by Orson Scott Card (a parallel to the life of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement) takes place in an alternate America, beginning in the early 19th century. Prior to that time, a POD occurred: England, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, had banished "makers", or anyone else demonstrating "knacks" (an ability to perform seemingly supernatural feats) to the North American continent. Thus the early American colonists embraced as perfectly ordinary these gifts, and counted on them as a part of their daily lives. The political division of the continent is considerably altered, with two large English colonies bookending a smaller "American" nation, one aligned with England, and the other governed by exiled Cavaliers. Actual historical figures are seen in a much different light: Ben Franklin is revered as the continent's finest "maker", George Washington was executed after being captured, and "Tom" Jefferson is the first president of "Appalachia", the result of a compromise between the Continentals and the Crown.[*citation needed*]

On the other hand, when the "Old Ones" still manifest themselves in England in Keith Roberts's *Pavane*, which takes place in a technologically backward world after a Spanish assassination of Elizabeth I allowed the Spanish Armada to conquer England, the possibility that the fairies were real but retreated from modern advances makes the POD possible: the fairies really were present all along, in a secret history. Again, in the English Renaissance fantasy *Armor of Light* by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett, the magic used in the book, by Dr. John Dee and others, actually was practiced in the Renaissance; positing a secret history of effective magic makes this an alternate history with a POD, Sir Philip Sidney's surviving the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, and shortly thereafter saving the life of Christopher Marlowe.

Many works of fantasy posit a world in which known practitioners of magic were able to make it function, and where the consequences of such reality would not, in fact, disturb history to such an extent as to make it plainly alternate history. Many ambiguous alternate/secret histories are set in Renaissance or pre-Renaissance times, and may explicitly include a "retreat" from the world, which would explain the current absence of such phenomena.

When the magical version of our world's history is set in contemporary times, the distinction becomes clear between alternate history on the one hand and contemporary fantasy, using in effect a form of secret history (as when Josepha Sherman's *Son of Darkness* has an elf living in New York City, in disguise) on the other. In works such as Robert A. Heinlein's *Magic, Incorporated* where a construction company can use magic to rig up stands at a sporting event and Poul Anderson's *Operation Chaos* and its sequel *Operation Luna*, where djinns are serious weapons of war—with atomic bombs—the use of magic throughout the United States and other modern countries makes it clear that this is not secret history—although references in *Operation Chaos* to degaussing the effects of cold iron make it possible that it is the result of a POD. The sequel clarifies this as the result of a collaboration of Einstein and Planck in 1901, resulting in the theory of "rhea tics". Henry Moseley applies this theory to "degauss the effects of cold iron and release the goetic forces." This results in the suppression of ferromagnetism and the re-emergence of magic and magical creatures.

Alternate history shades off into other fantasy subgenres when the use of actual, though altered, history and geography decreases, although a culture may still be clearly the original source; Barry Hughart's *Bridge of Birds* and its sequels take place in a fantasy world, albeit one clearly based on China, and with allusions to actual Chinese history, such as the Empress Wu. Richard Garfinkle's *Celestial Matters* incorporates ancient Chinese physics and Greek Aristotelian physics, using them as if factual.

A fantasy version of the paratime police was developed by children's writer Diana Wynne Jones in her *Chrestomanci* quartet (1977–1988), with wizards taking the place of high tech secret agents. Among the novels in this series, *Witch Week* stands out for its vivid depiction of a history alternate to that of Chrestomanci's own world rather than our own (and yet with a specific POD that turned it away from the "normal" history of most worlds visited by the wizard).

Terry Pratchett's works include several references to alternate histories of Discworld. *Men At Arms* observes that in millions of universes, Edward d'Eath became an obsessive recluse rather than the instigator of the plot that he is in the novel. In *Jingo*, Vimes accidentally picks up a pocket organizer that should have gone down another leg of the Trousers of Time, and so can hear the organizer reporting on the deaths that would have occurred had his decision gone otherwise. Indeed, Discworld contains an equivalent of the Time Patrol in its History Monks. *Night Watch* revolves around a repair of history after a time traveller's murder of an important figure in Vimes's past. *Thief of Time* presents them functioning as a full-scale Time Patrol, ensuring that history occurs at all.

Alternate history has long been a staple of Japanese speculative fiction with such authors as Futaro Yamada and Ryō Hanmura writing novels set in recognizable historical settings with supernatural or science fiction elements present. In 1973, Ryō Hanmura wrote *Musubi no Yama Hiroku* which recreated 400 years of Japan's history from the perspective of a secret magical family with psychic abilities. The novel has since come to be recognized as a masterpiece of Japanese speculative fiction. Twelve years later, author Hiroshi Aramata wrote the groundbreaking *Teito Monogatari* which reimagined the history of Tokyo across the 20th century in a world heavily influenced by the supernatural.

The TV show *Sliders* explores different possible alternate realities by having the protagonist "slide" into different parallel dimensions of the same planet Earth. Another TV show *Motherland: Fort Salem* explores a female-dominated world in which witchcraft is real. Its world diverged from our timeline when the *Salem witch trials* are resolved by an agreement between witches and non witches.

The two-part play *Harry Potter and the Cursed Child* contains alternate timelines set within the world of Harry Potter.

In *World of Winx,* the seven fairies- Bloom, Stella, Musa, Tecna, Flora, Aisha and Roxy- live on Earth, where humans are ignorant of the existence of fairies or belief in magic; much unlike the fourth season of *Winx Club*, where they had brought all magic back to Earth by releasing its terrestrial fairies.

### Video games

For the same reasons that this genre is explored by role-playing games, alternate history is also an intriguing backdrop for the storylines of many video games. A famous example of an alternate history game is *Command & Conquer: Red Alert*. Released in 1996, the game presents a point of divergence in 1946 where Albert Einstein goes back in time to prevent World War II from ever taking place by erasing Adolf Hitler from time after he is released from Landsberg Prison in 1924. He is successful in his mission, but in the process allows Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union to become powerful enough to launch a massive campaign to conquer Europe.

In the *Civilization* series, the player guides a civilization from prehistory to the present day, creating radically altered versions of history on a long time-scale. Several scenarios recreate a particular period which becomes the "point of divergence" in an alternate history shaped by the player's actions. Popular examples in *Sid Meier's Civilization IV* include *Desert War*, set in the Mediterranean theatre of World War II and featuring scripted events tied to possible outcomes of battles; *Broken Star*, set in a hypothetical Russian civil war in 2010; and *Rhye's and Fall of Civilization*, an 'Earth simulator' designed to mirror a history as closely as possible but incorporating unpredictable elements to provide realistic alternate settings.

In some games such as the *Metal Gear* and *Resident Evil* series, events that were originally intended to represent the near future at the time the games were originally released later ended up becoming alternate histories in later entries in those franchises. For example, *Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake* (1990), set in 1999, depicted a near future that ended up becoming an alternate history in *Metal Gear Solid* (1998). Likewise, *Resident Evil* (1996) and *Resident Evil 2* (1998), both set in 1998, depicted near-future events that had later become an alternative history by the time *Resident Evil 4* (2005) was released.

In the 2009 steampunk shooter, *Damnation* is set on an alternate version of planet Earth, in the early part of the 20th century after the American Civil War, which had spanned over several decades, where steam engines replace combustion engines. The game sees the protagonists fighting off a rich industrialist who wants to do away with both the Union and Confederacy in one swift movement and turn the United States of America into a country called the "American Empire" with a totalitarian dictatorship.

*Crimson Skies* is one example of an alternate history spawning multiple interpretations in multiple genres. The stories and games in *Crimson Skies* take place in an alternate 1930s United States, where the nation crumbled into many hostile states following the effects of the Great Depression, the Great War, and Prohibition. With the road and railway system destroyed, commerce took to the skies, which led to the emergence of air pirate gangs who plunder the aerial commerce.

The game *Freedom Fighters* portrays a situation similar to that of the movie *Red Dawn* and *Red Alert 2*, though less comically than the latter. The point of divergence is during World War II, where the Soviet Union develops an atomic bomb first and uses it on Berlin. With the balance of power and influence tipped in Russia's favor, history diverges; brief summaries at the beginning of the game inform the player of the Communist bloc's complete takeover of Europe by 1953, a different ending to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the spread of Soviet influence into South America and Mexico.

Similarly, the 2007 video game *World in Conflict* is set in 1989, with the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse. The point of divergence is several months before the opening of the game, when Warsaw Pact forces staged a desperate invasion of Western Europe. As the game begins, a Soviet invasion force lands in Seattle, taking advantage of the fact that most of the US military is in Europe.

The game *Battlestations: Pacific*, released in 2008, offered in alternate history campaign for the Imperial Japanese Navy, wherein Japan destroys all three carriers in the Battle of Midway, which follows with a successful invasion of the island. Because of this, the United States lacked any sort of aerial power to fight the Japanese, and is continuously forced into the defense.

*Turning Point: Fall of Liberty*, released in February 2008, is an alternate history first person shooter where Winston Churchill died in 1931 from being struck by a taxi cab. Because of this, Great Britain lacks the charismatic leader needed to keep the country together and Nazi Germany successfully conquers Great Britain via Operation Sea Lion in 1940. Germany later conquers the rest of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East while mass-producing their wunderwaffe. The Axis launch a surprise invasion of an isolationist United States' Eastern Seaboard in 1953, which forces the country to surrender and submit to a puppet government.

Another alternate history game involving Nazis is *War Front: Turning Point* in which Hitler died during the early days of World War II and thus, a much more effective leadership rose to power. Under the command of a new Führer (who is referred to as "Chancellor", and his real name is never revealed), Operation Sealion succeeds and the Nazis successfully conquer Britain, sparking a cold war between the Allied Powers and Germany.

The *Fallout* series of computer role-playing games is set in a divergent America, where history after World War II diverges from the real world to follow a retro-futuristic timeline. For example, fusion power was invented quite soon after the end of the war, but the transistor was never developed. The result was a future that has a 1950s 'World of Tomorrow' feel to it, with extremely high technology such as artificial intelligence implemented with thermionic valves and other technologies now considered obsolete.

Many game series by Swedish developer Paradox Interactive start off at a concise point in history, allowing the player to immerse in the role of a contemporary leader and alter the course of in-game history. The most prominent game with this setting is *Crusader Kings II*.

*S.T.A.L.K.E.R.* games have an alternate history at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where a special area called "The Zone" is formed.

*Wolfenstein: The New Order* is set in an alternate 1960 in which the Nazis won the Second World War, also thanks to their acquisition of high technology. The sequel *Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus* continues this, although being set in the conquered United States of America.

## Pt 2. Counterfactual history

**Counterfactual history**, also sometimes referred to as **virtual history**, is a form of historiography that attempts to answer "what if" questions known as counterfactuals. Black and MacRaild provide this definition: "It is, at the very root, the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen." The method seeks to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. It has produced a literary genre which is variously called alternate history, speculative history, or hypothetical history.

One goal is to estimate the relative importance of a specific event, incident or person. For instance, to the counterfactual claim "What would have happened had Hitler drunk coffee instead of tea on the afternoon he committed suicide?", the timeline would have remained unchanged—Hitler in all likelihood still would have committed suicide on April 30, 1945, regardless of what he had to drink that afternoon. However, to the counterfactual "What would have happened had Hitler died in the July 1944 assassination attempt?", all sorts of possibilities become readily apparent, starting with the assumption that the German generals, had they been able to consolidate power over remaining Nazi functionaries such as Goebbels and Himmler, would probably have sued for peace, bringing an early end to World War II. (Historians generally feel popular support for the Party was still very strong in July 1944, and the party apparatus of Himmler, Goebbels, Speer, Bormann, Göring etc. would survive even an assassination of Hitler.) Thus, the counterfactual brings into sharp relief the question of how important Hitler was as an individual and how his personal fate shaped the course of the war and, ultimately, of world history.

## Development

Although there are Victorian examples of counterfactual history, it was not until the very late 20th century that the major interest for exploration of counterfactuals in history began.

An early example is *If It Had Happened Otherwise* (1931) which features a contribution by Winston Churchill who examined what would have happened had Robert E. Lee won at the Battle of Gettysburg. Although this volume is notable for featuring imagined histories by serious historians, the histories are presented in narrative form (in most cases with a fairly whimsical tone) without any analysis of the reasoning behind these scenarios, so they fall short of modern standards for serious counterfactual history and are closer to the fictional alternate history genre.

A significant foray into treating counterfactual scenarios seriously was made by the economic historian Robert Fogel. In his 1964 book *Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History*, Fogel tried to use quantitative methods to imagine what the U.S. economy would have been like in 1890 had there been no railroads. Fogel hypothesizes that, in the absence of the railroad, America’s large canal system would have been expanded and its roads would have been improved through pavement; both of these improvements would take away from the social impact of the railroad. He estimates that “the level of per capita income achieved by January 1, 1890 would have been reached by March 31, 1890, if railroads had never been invented.”

Few further attempts to bring counterfactual history into the world of academia were made until the 1991 publication of *Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences* by the Cambridge sociologist Geoffrey Hawthorn, who carefully explored three different counterfactual scenarios. This work helped inspire *Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals* (1997), a collection of essays exploring different scenarios by a number of historians, edited by the historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson has become a significant advocate of counterfactual history, using counterfactual scenarios to illustrate his objections to deterministic theories of history such as Marxism, and to put forward a case for the importance of contingency in history, theorizing that a few key changes could result in a significantly different modern world. A series of "What If?" books edited by Robert Cowley presented dozens of essays by historians or prominent writers about "how a slight turn of fate at a decisive moment could have changed the very annals of time."

Some scholars argue that a counterfactual is not as much a matter of what happened in the past but it is the disagreement about which past events were most significant. For example, William Thompson employs a sequence of counterfactuals for eight lead economies that have driven globalization processes for almost a thousand years. From Song dynasty in China to Genoa, Venice, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States, and claims that each actor in succession played an unusually critical role in creating a structure of leadership that became increasingly global in scope across time.

### Differences from alternate history

Counterfactual history is neither historical revisionism nor alternate history.

Counterfactual history distinguishes itself through its interest in the very incident that is being negated by the counterfactual, thus seeking to evaluate the event's relative historical importance. Such historians reason arguments for each change, outlining changes in broad terms only, as befits a mere byproduct of the exercise.

An alternate history writer, on the other hand, is interested precisely in the hypothetical scenarios that flow from the negated incident or event. A fiction writer is thus free to invent very specific events and characters in the imagined history.

The line is sometimes blurred as historians may invent more detailed timelines as illustrations of their ideas about the types of changes that might have occurred. But it is usually clear what general types of consequences the author thinks are reasonable to suppose would have been likely to occur, and what specific details are included in an imagined timeline only for illustrative purposes.

The line is further blurred by novelists such as Kim Stanley Robinson, whose alternate-history novel *The Years of Rice and Salt* has a character talking of historians' use of counterfactuals, within the novel's alternate history. He dismisses this as "a useless exercise".

## Criticism

Most historians regard counterfactual history as perhaps entertaining, but not meeting the standards of mainstream historical research due to its speculative nature. Advocates of counterfactual history often respond that all statements about causality in history contain implicit counterfactual claims—for example, the claim that a certain military decision helped a country win a war presumes that if that decision had not been made, the war would have been less likely to be won, or would have been longer.

Since counterfactual history is such a recent development, a serious, systematic critique of its uses and methodologies has yet to be made, as the movement itself is still working out those methods and frameworks.

Aviezer Tucker has offered a range of criticism of this approach to the study of the past both in his review of Ferguson's *Virtual History in History and Theory* and in his book *Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography*, as has Richard J. Evans in his book *Altered Pasts*.

## Online

Fans of alternate history have made use of the internet from a very early point to showcase their own works and provide useful tools for those fans searching for anything alternate history, first in mailing lists and usenet groups, later in web databases and forums. The "Usenet Alternate History List" was first posted on April 11, 1991, to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf-lovers. In May 1995, the dedicated newsgroup *soc.history.what-if* was created for showcasing and discussing alternate histories. Its prominence declined with the general migration from unmoderated usenet to moderated web forums, most prominently AlternateHistory.com, the self-described "largest gathering of alternate history fans on the internet" with over 10,000 active members.

In addition to these discussion forums, in 1997 Uchronia: The Alternate History List was created as an online repository, now containing over 2,900 alternate history novels, stories, essays, and other printed materials in several different languages. Uchronia was selected as the Sci Fi Channel's "Sci Fi Site of the Week" twice.

## Pt. 3 Narrative

A **narrative**, **story** or **tale** is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, still or moving images, or any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb *narrare* (to tell), which is derived from the adjective *gnarus* (knowing or skilled). Along with argumentation, description, and exposition, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which the narrator communicates directly to the reader.

Oral storytelling is the earliest method for sharing narratives. During most people's childhoods, narratives are used to guide them on proper behavior, cultural history, formation of a communal identity and values, as especially studied in anthropology today among traditional indigenous peoples.

Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television and video, video games, radio, game-play, unstructured recreation and performance in general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and other visual arts, as long as a sequence of events is presented. Several art movements, such as modern art, refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual.

Narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories: non-fiction (such as definitively including creative non-fiction, biography, journalism, transcript poetry and historiography); fictionalization of historical events (such as anecdote, myth, legend and historical fiction) and fiction proper (such as literature in prose and sometimes poetry, such as short stories, novels and narrative poems and songs, and imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games or live or recorded performances). Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable narrator (a character) typically found in the genre of noir fiction. An important part of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a process narration (see also "Aesthetics approach" below).

## Overview

A narrative is a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee (although there may be more than one of each). Narratives are to be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or situations, and also from dramatic enactments of events (although a dramatic work may also include narrative speeches). A narrative consists of a set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the plot, which can also mean "story synopsis"). The category of narratives includes both the shortest accounts of events (for example, *the cat sat on the mat*, or a brief news item) and the longest historical or biographical works, diaries, travelogues, and so forth, as well as novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms. In the study of fiction, it is usual to divide novels and shorter stories into first-person narratives and third-person narratives. As an adjective, "narrative" means "characterized by or relating to storytelling": thus **narrative technique** is the method of telling stories, and **narrative poetry** is the class of poems (including ballads, epics, and verse romances) that tell stories, as distinct from dramatic and lyric poetry. Some theorists of narratology have attempted to isolate the quality or set of properties that distinguishes narrative from non-narrative writings: this is called **narrativity**.

## History

In India, archaeological evidence of the presence of stories is found at the Indus valley civilization site, Lothal. On one large vessel, the artist depicts birds with fish in their beaks resting in a tree, while a fox-like animal stands below. This scene bears resemblance to the story of *The Fox and the Crow* in the Panchatantra. On a miniature jar, the story of the thirsty crow and deer is depicted, of how the deer could not drink from the narrow-mouth of the jar, while the crow succeeded by dropping stones into the jar. The features of the animals are clear and graceful.

## Human nature

Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes, "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers." Stories are an important aspect of culture. Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories; indeed, most of the humanities involve stories. Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, Chinese and Indian cultures and their myths. Stories are also a ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples to illustrate points. Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. As noted by Owen Flanagan, narrative may also refer to psychological processes in self-identity, memory and meaning-making.

Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs; semantics is the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and non-verbal elements, and creating a discourse with different modalities and forms.

In *On Realism in Art*, Roman Jakobson attests that literature exists as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are the same, except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive *literary* qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp, who analyzed the plots used in traditional folk-tales and identified 31 distinct functional components. This trend (or these trends) continued in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important theoretical questions:

* What is *text?*
* What is its role (culture)?
* How is it manifested as art, cinema, theater, or literature?
* Why is narrative divided into different genres, such as poetry, short stories, and novels?

## Literary theory

In literary theoretic approach, narrative is being narrowly defined as fiction-writing mode in which the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. Until the late 19th century, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the *Iliad* and *Paradise Lost,* and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author.

But novels, lending a number of voices to several characters in addition to narrator's, created a possibility of narrator's views differing significantly from the author's views. With the rise of the novel in the 18th century, the concept of the narrator (as opposed to "author") made the question of narrator a prominent one for literary theory. It has been proposed that perspective and interpretive knowledge are the essential characteristics, while focalization and structure are lateral characteristics of the narrator.[*according to whom?*]

The role of literary theory in narrative has been disputed; with some interpretations like Todorov's narrative model that views all narratives in a cyclical manner, and that each narrative is characterized by a three part structure that allows the narrative to progress. The beginning stage being an establishment of equilibrium—a state of non conflict, followed by a disruption to this state, caused by an external event, and lastly a restoration or a return to equilibrium—a conclusion that brings the narrative back to a similar space before the events of the narrative unfolded.

Other critiques of literary theory in narrative challenge the very role of literariness in narrative, as well as the role of narrative in literature. Meaning, narratives and their associated aesthetics, emotions, and values have the ability to operate without the presence of literature and vice versa. According to Didier Costa, the structural model used by Todorov and others is unfairly biased towards a Western interpretation of narrative, and that a more comprehensive and transformative model must be created in order to properly analyze narrative discourse in literature. Framing also plays a pivotal role in narrative structure; an analysis of the historical and cultural contexts present during the development of a narrative is needed in order to more accurately represent the role of narratology in societies that relied heavily on oral narratives.

## Types of narrators and their modes

A writer's choice in the narrator is crucial for the way a work of fiction is perceived by the reader. There is a distinction between first-person and third-person narrative, which Gérard Genette refers to as intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrative, respectively. Intradiagetic narrators are of two types: a homodiegetic narrator participates as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know more about other characters than what their actions reveal. A heterodiegetic narrator, in contrast, describes the experiences of the characters that appear in the story in which he or she does not participate.

Most narrators present their story from one of the following perspectives (called narrative modes): first-person, or third-person limited or omniscient. Generally, a first-person narrator brings greater focus on the feelings, opinions, and perceptions of a particular character in a story, and on how the character views the world and the views of other characters. If the writer's intention is to get inside the world of a character, then it is a good choice, although a third-person limited narrator is an alternative that does not require the writer to reveal all that a first-person character would know. By contrast, a third-person omniscient narrator gives a panoramic view of the world of the story, looking into many characters and into the broader background of a story. A third-person omniscient narrator can be an animal or an object, or it can be a more abstract instance that does not refer to itself. For stories in which the context and the views of many characters are important, a third-person narrator is a better choice. However, a third-person narrator does not need to be an omnipresent guide, but instead may merely be the protagonist referring to himself in the third person (also known as third person limited narrator).

### Multiple narrators

A writer may choose to let several narrators tell the story from different points of view. Then it is up to the reader to decide which narrator seems most reliable for each part of the story. It may refer to the style of the writer in which he/she expresses the paragraph written. See for instance the works of Louise Erdrich. William Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying* is a prime example of the use of multiple narrators. Faulkner employs stream of consciousness to narrate the story from various perspectives.

In Indigenous American communities, narratives and storytelling are often told by a number of elders in the community. In this way, the stories are never static because they are shaped by the relationship between narrator and audience. Thus, each individual story may have countless variations. Narrators often incorporate minor changes in the story in order to tailor the story to different audiences.

The use of multiple narratives in a story is not simply a stylistic choice, but rather an interpretive one that offers insight into the development of a larger social identity and the impact that has on the overarching narrative, as explained by Lee Haring. Haring analyzes the use of framing in oral narratives, and how the usage of multiple perspectives provides the audience with a greater historical and cultural background of the narrative. She also argues that narratives (particularly myths and folktales) that implement multiple narrators deserves to be categorized as its own narrative genre, rather than simply a narrative device that is used solely to explain phenomena from different points of view.

Haring provides an example from the Arabic folktales of *A Thousand and One Nights* to illustrate how framing was used to loosely connect each story to the next, where each story was enclosed within the larger narrative. Additionally, Haring draws comparisons between *Thousand and One Nights* and the oral storytelling observed in parts of rural Ireland, islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean, and African cultures such as Madagascar.

## Aesthetics approach

Narrative is a highly aesthetic art. Thoughtfully composed stories have a number of aesthetic elements. Such elements include the idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, middles and ends, or exposition-development-climax-denouement, with coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality including retention of the past, attention to present action and protention/future anticipation; a substantial focus on character and characterization, "arguably the most important single component of the novel" (David Lodge *The Art of Fiction* 67); different voices interacting, "the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers" (Lodge *The Art of Fiction* 97; see also the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin for expansion of this idea); a narrator or narrator-like voice, which "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, forming a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on the use of literary tropes (see Hayden White, *Metahistory* for expansion of this idea); is often intertextual with other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward *bildungsroman*, a description of identity development with an effort to evince *becoming* in character and community.[*jargon*]

### Psychological approach

Within philosophy of mind, the social sciences and various clinical fields including medicine, narrative can refer to aspects of human psychology. A personal narrative process is involved in a person's sense of personal or cultural identity, and in the creation and construction of memories; it is thought by some to be the fundamental nature of the self. The breakdown of a coherent or positive narrative has been implicated in the development of psychosis and mental disorder, and its repair said to play an important role in journeys of recovery. Narrative Therapy is a school of (family) psychotherapy.

Illness narratives are a way for a person affected by an illness to make sense of his or her experiences. They typically follow one of several set patterns: *restitution*, *chaos*, or *quest* narratives. In the restitution narrative, the person sees the illness as a temporary detour. The primary goal is to return permanently to normal life and normal health. These may also be called **cure narratives**. In the chaos narrative, the person sees the illness as a permanent state that will inexorably get worse, with no redeeming virtues. This is typical of diseases like Alzheimer's disease: the patient gets worse and worse, and there is no hope of returning to normal life. The third major type, the quest narrative, positions the illness experience as an opportunity to transform oneself into a better person through overcoming adversity and re-learning what is most important in life; the physical outcome of the illness is less important than the spiritual and psychological transformation. This is typical of the triumphant view of cancer survivorship in the breast cancer culture.

Personality traits, more specifically the Big Five personality traits, appear to be associated with the type of language or patterns of word use found in an individual's self-narrative. In other words, language use in self-narratives accurately reflects human personality. The linguistic correlates of each Big Five trait are as follows:

* Extraversion - positively correlated with words referring to humans, social processes and family;
* Agreeableness - positively correlated with family, inclusiveness and certainty; negatively correlated with anger and body (that is, few negative comments about health/body);
* Conscientiousness - positively correlated with achievement and work; negatively related to body, death, anger and exclusiveness;
* Neuroticism - positively correlated with sadness, negative emotion, body, anger, home and anxiety; negatively correlated with work;
* Openness - positively correlated with perceptual processes, hearing and exclusiveness

## Social-sciences approaches

generated. Narratives thus lie at foundations of our cognitive procedures and also provide an explanatory framework for the social sciences, particularly when it is difficult to assemble enough cases to permit statistical analysis. Narrative is often used in case study research in the social sciences. Here it has been found that the dense, contextual, and interpenetrating nature of social forces uncovered by detailed narratives is often more interesting and useful for both social theory and social policy than other forms of social inquiry.

Sociologists Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein have contributed to the formation of a constructionist approach to narrative in sociology. From their book The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World (2000), to more recent texts such as Analyzing Narrative Reality (2009) and Varieties of Narrative Analysis (2012), they have developed an analytic framework for researching stories and storytelling that is centered on the interplay of institutional discourses (big stories) on the one hand, and everyday accounts (little stories) on the other. The goal is the sociological understanding of formal and lived texts of experience, featuring the production, practices, and communication of accounts.

### Inquiry approach

In order to avoid "hardened stories," or "narratives that become context-free, portable and ready to be used anywhere and anytime for illustrative purposes" and are being used as conceptual metaphors as defined by linguist George Lakoff, an approach called narrative inquiry was proposed, resting on the epistemological assumption that human beings make sense of random or complex multicausal experience by the imposition of story structures." Human propensity to simplify data through a predilection for narratives over complex data sets typically leads to narrative fallacy. It is easier for the human mind to remember and make decisions on the basis of stories with meaning, than to remember strings of data. This is one reason why narratives are so powerful and why many of the classics in the humanities and social sciences are written in the narrative format. But humans read meaning into data and compose stories, even where this is unwarranted. In narrative inquiry, the way to avoid the narrative fallacy is no different from the way to avoid other error in scholarly research, that is, by applying the usual methodical checks for validity and reliability in how data are collected, analyzed, and presented.[*citation needed*] Several criteria for assessing the validity of narrative research was proposed, including the objective aspect, the emotional aspect, the social/moral aspect, and the clarity of the story.

### Mathematical-sociology approach

directed graph where multiple causal links incident into a node are conjoined) of action-driven sequential events.

Narratives so conceived comprise the following ingredients:

* A finite set of state descriptions of the world S, the components of which are weakly ordered in time;
* A finite set of actors/agents (individual or collective), P;
* A finite set of actions A;
* A mapping of P onto A;

The structure (directed graph) is generated by letting the nodes stand for the states and the directed edges represent how the states are changed by specified actions. The action skeleton can then be abstracted, comprising a further digraph where the actions are depicted as nodes and edges take the form "action **a** co-determined (in context of other actions) action **b**".

Narratives can be both abstracted and generalised by imposing an algebra upon their structures and thence defining homomorphism between the algebras. The insertion of action-driven causal links in a narrative can be achieved using the method of Bayesian narratives.

#### Bayesian narratives

Developed by Peter Abell, the theory of Bayesian Narratives conceives a narrative as a directed graph comprising multiple causal links (social interactions) of the general form: "action ***a*** causes action ***b*** in a specified context". In the absence of sufficient comparative cases to enable statistical treatment of the causal links, items of evidence in support and against a particular causal link are assembled and used to compute the Bayesian likelihood ratio of the link. Subjective causal statements of the form "I/she did **b** because of **a**" and subjective counterfactuals "if it had not been for **a** I/she would not have done **b**" are notable items of evidence.

## In music

Linearity is one of several narrative qualities that can be found in a musical composition. As noted by American musicologist, Edward Cone, narrative terms are also present in the analytical language about music. The different components of a fugue — subject, answer, exposition, discussion and summary — can be cited as an example. However, there are several views on the concept of narrative in music and the role it plays. One theory is that of Theodore Adorno, who has suggested that "music recites itself, is its own context, narrates without narrative". Another, is that of Carolyn Abbate, who has suggested that "certain gestures experienced in music constitute a narrating voice". Still others have argued that narrative is a semiotic enterprise that can enrich musical analysis. The French musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez contends that "the narrative, strictly speaking, is not in the music, but in the plot imagined and constructed by the listeners". He argues that discussing music in terms of narrativity is simply metaphorical and that the "imagined plot" may be influenced by the work's title or other programmatic information provided by the composer. However, Abbate has revealed numerous examples of musical devices that function as narrative voices, by limiting music's ability to narrate to rare "moments that can be identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect". Various theorists share this view of narrative appearing in disruptive rather than normative moments in music. The final word is yet to be said, regarding narratives in music, as there is still much to be determined.

## In Film

Unlike most forms of narratives that are inherently language based (whether that be narratives presented in literature or orally), film narratives face additional challenges in creating a cohesive narrative. Whereas the general assumption in literary theory is that a narrator must be present in order to develop a narrative, as Schmid proposes; the act of an author writing his or her words in text is what communicates to the audience (in this case readers) the narrative of the text, and the author represents an act of narrative communication between the textual narrator and the narratee. This is in line with Fludernik's perspective on what's called cognitive narratology—which states that a literary text has the ability to manifest itself into an imagined, representational illusion that the reader will create for themselves, and can vary greatly from reader to reader. In other words, the scenarios of a literary text (referring to settings, frames, schemes, etc.) are going to be represented differently for each individual reader based on a multiplicity of factors, including the reader's own personal life experiences that allow them to comprehend the literary text in a distinct manner from anyone else.

Film narrative does not have the luxury of having a textual narrator that guides its audience towards a formative narrative; nor does it have the ability to allow its audience to visually manifest the contents of its narrative in a unique fashion like literature does. Instead, film narratives utilize visual and auditory devices in substitution for a narrative subject; these devices include cinematography, editing, sound design (both diegetic and non-diegetic sound), as well as the arrangement and decisions on how and where the subjects are located onscreen—known as *mise-en-scène.* These cinematic devices, among others, contribute to the unique blend of visual and auditory storytelling that culminates to what Jose Landa refers to as a "visual narrative instance". And unlike narratives found in other performance arts such as plays and musicals, film narratives are not bound to a specific place and time, and are not limited by scene transitions in plays, which are restricted by set design and allotted time.

## In mythology

The nature or existence of a formative narrative in many of the world's myths, folktales, and legends has been a topic of debate for many modern scholars; but the most common consensus among academics is that throughout most cultures, traditional mythologies and folklore tales are constructed and retold with a specific narrative purpose that serves to offer a society an understandable explanation of natural phenomenon—oftentimes absent of a verifiable author. These explanatory tales manifest themselves in various forms and serve different societal functions, including; life lessons individuals to learn from (for example, the Ancient Greek tale of Icarus refusing to listen to his elders and flying too close to the sun), explain forces of nature or other natural phenomenon (for example, the flood myth that spans cultures all over the world), and lastly to provide an understanding of our own human nature, as exemplified by the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

Considering how mythologies have historically been transmitted and passed down through oral retellings, there is no qualitative or reliable method to precisely trace exactly where and when a tale originated; and since myths are rooted in a remote past, and are viewed as a factual account of happenings within the culture it originated from, the worldview present in many oral mythologies is from a cosmological perspective—one that is told from a voice that has no physical embodiment, and is passed down and modified from generation to generation. This cosmological worldview in myth is what provides all mythological narratives credence, and since they are easily communicated and modified through oral tradition amongst various cultures, they help solidify the cultural identity of a civilization and contribute to the notion of a collective human consciousness that continues to help shape our own understanding of the world.

Myth is often used in an overarching sense to describe a multitude of folklore genres, but there is a significance in distinguishing the various forms of folklore in order to properly determine what narratives constitute as mythological, as esteemed anthropologist Sir James Frazer suggests. Frazer contends that there are three primary categories of mythology (now more broadly considered categories of folklore): Myths, legends, and folktales, and that by definition, each genre pulls its narrative from a different ontological source, and therefore have different implications within a civilization. Frazer states:

"If these definitions be accepted, we may say that myth has its source in reason, legend in memory, and folk-tale in imagination; and that the three riper products of the human mind which correspond to these its crude creations are science, history, and romance."

Janet Bacon expanded upon Frazer's categorization in her 1921 publication—*The Voyage of The Argonauts*.

1. **Myth** – According to Janet Bacon's 1921 publication, she states that, "Myth has an explanatory intention. It explains some natural phenomenon whose causes are not obvious, or some ritual practice whose origin has been forgotten." Bacon views myths as narratives that serve a practical societal function of providing a satisfactory explanation for many of humanity's greatest questions. Questions that address topics such as astronomical events, historical circumstances, environmental phenomena, and a range of human experiences including love, anger, greed, and isolation.
2. **Legend** – Bacon aptly describes as such, "Legend, on the other hand, is true tradition founded on the fortunes of real people or on adventures at real places. Agamemnon, Lycurgus, Coriolanus, King Arthur, Saladin, are real people whose fame and the legends which spread it have become world-wide." Legends are mythical figures whose accomplishments and accolades live beyond their own mortality and transcend to the realm of myth by way of verbal communication through the ages. Like myth, they are rooted in the past, but unlike the sacred ephemeral space in which myths occur, legends are often individuals of human flesh that lived here on earth long ago, and are believed as fact. In American folklore, the tale of Davy Crocket or debatably Paul Bunyan can be considered legends—as they were real people who lived in our world, but through the years of regional folktales—have assumed a mythological quality.
3. **Folktale** – Bacon classifies folktale as such, "Folk-tale, however, calls for no belief, being wholly the product of the imagination. In far distant ages some inventive story-teller was pleased to pass an idle hour "with stories told of many-a-feat." What Bacon's definition assumes is that folktales do not possess the same underlying factualness that myths and legends tend to have. Folktales still hold a considerable cultural value, they are simply not regarded as true within a civilization. Bacon says, like myths, folktales are imagined and created by someone at some point, but differ in that folktales' primary purpose is to entertain; and that like legends, folktales may possess some element of truth in their original conception, but lack any form of credibility found in legends.

### Structure

In the absence of a known author or original narrator, myth narratives are oftentimes referred to as **prose narratives**. Prose narratives tend to be relatively linear regarding the time period they occur in, and are traditionally marked by its natural flow of speech as opposed to the rhythmic structure found in various forms of literature such as poetry and Haikus. The structure of prose narratives allows it to be easily understood by many—as the narrative generally starts at the beginning of the story, and ends when the protagonist has resolved the conflict. These kinds of narratives are generally accepted as true within society, and are told from a place of great reverence and sacredness. Myths are believed to occur in a remote past—one that is before the creation or establishment of the civilization they derive from, and are intended to provide an account for things such as our origins, natural phenomenon, as well as our own human nature. Thematically, myths seek to provide information about ourselves, and many are viewed as among some of the oldest forms of prose narratives, which grants traditional myths their fascinating and life defining characteristics that continue to be communicated today.

Another theory regarding the purpose and function of mythological narratives derives from 20th Century philologist Georges Dumézil and his formative theory of the "**trifunctionalism**" found in Indo-European mythologies. Dumèzil refers only to the myths found in Indo-European societies, but the primary assertion made by his theory is that Indo European life was structured around the notion of three distinct and necessary societal functions, and as a result, the various gods and goddesses in Indo European mythology assumed these functions as well. The three functions were organized by cultural significance—with the first function being the most grand and sacred. For Dumèzil, these functions were so vital, they manifested themselves in every aspect of life and were at the center of everyday life.

These "functions", as Dumèzil puts it, were an array of esoteric knowledge and wisdom that was reflected by the mythology. The first function being sovereignty—and was divided into two additional categories: magical and juridical. As each function in Dumèzil's theory corresponded to a designated social class in the human realm; the first function was the highest, and was reserved for the status of kings and other royalty. In an interview with Alain Benoist, Dumèzil described magical sovereignty as such,

This implies that gods of the first function are responsible for the overall structure and order of the universe, and those gods who possess juridical sovereignty are more closely connected to the realm of humans and are responsible for the concept of justice and order. Dumèzil uses the pantheon of Norse gods as examples of these functions in his 1981 essay—he finds that the Norse gods Odin and Tyr reflect the different brands of sovereignty. Odin is the author of the cosmos, and possessor of infinite esoteric knowledge—going so far as to sacrifice his eye for the accumulation of more knowledge. While Tyr—seen as the "just god"—is more concerned with upholding justice, as illustrated by the epic myth of Tyr losing his hand in exchange for the monster Fenrir to cease his terrorization of the gods. What this tells us is that through these myths, concepts of universal wisdom and justice were able to be communicated to the Nordic people in the form of a mythological narrative.

The second function as described by Dumèzil is that of the proverbial hero, or champion. These myths functioned to convey the themes of heroism, strength, and bravery and were most often represented in both the human world and the mythological world by valiant warriors. While the gods of the second function were still revered in society, they did not possess the same infinite knowledge found in the first category. A Norse god that would fall under the second function would be Thor—god of thunder. Thor possessed great strength, and was often first into battle, as ordered by his father Odin. This second function reflects Indo-European cultures' high regard for the warrior class, and explains the belief in an afterlife that rewards a valiant death on the battlefield; for the Norse mythology, this is represented by Valhalla.

Lastly, Dumèzil's third function is composed of gods that reflect the nature and values of the most common people in Indo-European life. These gods often presided over the realms of healing, prosperity, fertility, wealth, luxury, and youth—any kind of function that was easily related to by the common peasant farmer in a society. Just as a farmer would live and sustain themselves off their land, the gods of the third function were responsible for the prosperity of their crops, and were also in charge of other forms of everyday life that would never be observed by the status of kings and warriors, such as mischievousness and promiscuity. An example found in Norse mythology could be seen through the god Freyr—a god who was closely connected to acts of debauchery and overindulging.

Dumèzil viewed his theory of trifunctionalism as distinct from other mythological theories because of the way the narratives of Indo-European mythology permeated into every aspect of life within these societies, to the point that the societal view of death shifted away from our primal perception that tells us to fear death, and instead death became seen as the penultimate act of heroism—by solidifying your position in the hall of the gods when you pass from this realm to the next. More interestingly, however, Dumèzil proposed that his theory stood at the foundation of the modern understanding of the Christian Trinity, citing that the three key deities of Odin, Thor, and Freyr were often depicted together in a trio—seen by many as an overarching representation of what would be known today as "divinity".

## In cultural storytelling

A narrative can take on the shape of a story, which gives listeners an entertaining and collaborative avenue for acquiring knowledge. Many cultures use storytelling as a way to record histories, myths, and values. These stories can be seen as living entities of narrative among cultural communities, as they carry the shared experience and history of the culture within them. Stories are often used within indigenous cultures in order to share knowledge to the younger generation. Due to indigenous narratives leaving room for open-ended interpretation, native stories often engage children in the storytelling process so that they can make their own meaning and explanations within the story. This promotes holistic thinking among native children, which works towards merging an individual and world identity. Such an identity upholds native epistemology and gives children a sense of belonging as their cultural identity develops through the sharing and passing on of stories.

For example, a number of indigenous stories are used to illustrate a value or lesson. In the Western Apache tribe, stories can be used to warn of the misfortune that befalls people when they do not follow acceptable behavior. One story speaks to the offense of a mother's meddling in her married son's life. In the story, the Western Apache tribe is under attack from a neighboring tribe, the Pimas. The Apache mother hears a scream. Thinking it is her son's wife screaming, she tries to intervene by yelling at him. This alerts the Pima tribe to her location, and she is promptly killed due to intervening in her son's life.

Indigenous American cultures use storytelling to teach children the values and lessons of life. Although storytelling provides entertainment, its primary purpose is to educate. Alaskan Indigenous Natives state that narratives teach children where they fit in, what their society expects of them, how to create a peaceful living environment, and to be responsible, worthy members of their communities. In the Mexican culture, many adult figures tell their children stories in order to teach children values such as individuality, obedience, honesty, trust, and compassion. For example, one of the versions of La Llorona is used to teach children to make safe decisions at night and to maintain the morals of the community.

Narratives are considered by the Canadian Métis community, to help children understand that the world around them is interconnected to their lives and communities. For example, the Métis community share the "Humorous Horse Story" to children, which portrays that horses stumble throughout life just like humans do. Navajo stories also use dead animals as metaphors by showing that all things have purpose. Lastly, elders from Alaskan Native communities claim that the use of animals as metaphors allow children to form their own perspectives while at the same time self-reflecting on their own lives.

American Indian elders also state that storytelling invites the listeners, especially children, to draw their own conclusions and perspectives while self-reflecting upon their lives. Furthermore, they insist that narratives help children grasp and obtain a wide range of perspectives that help them interpret their lives in the context of the story. American Indian community members emphasize to children that the method of obtaining knowledge can be found in stories passed down through each generation. Moreover, community members also let the children interpret and build a different perspective of each story.

## Historiography

In historiography, according to Lawrence Stone, narrative has traditionally been the main rhetorical device used by historians. In 1979, at a time when the new Social History was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a move back toward the narrative. Stone defined narrative as organized chronologically; focused on a single coherent story; descriptive rather than analytical; concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and dealing with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. He reported that, "More and more of the 'new historians' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative."

Some philosophers identify narratives with a type of explanation. Mark Bevir argues, for example, that narratives explain actions by appealing to the beliefs and desires of actors and by locating webs of beliefs in the context of historical traditions. Narrative is an alternative form of explanation to that associated with natural science.

Historians committed to a social science approach, however, have criticized the narrowness of narrative and its preference for anecdote over analysis, and clever examples rather than statistical regularities.

## Storytelling rights

Storytelling rights may be broadly defined as the ethics of sharing narratives (including—but not limited to—firsthand, secondhand and imagined stories). In *Storytelling Rights: The uses of oral and written texts by urban adolescents*, author Amy Shuman offers the following definition of storytelling rights: “the important and precarious relationship between narrative and event and, specifically, between the participants in an event and the reporters who claim the right to talk about what happened."

The ethics of retelling other people's stories may be explored through a number of questions: whose story is being told and how, what is the story's purpose or aim, what does the story promise (for instance: empathy, redemption, authenticity, clarification)--and at whose benefit? Storytelling rights also implicates questions of consent, empathy, and accurate representation. While storytelling—and retelling—can function as a powerful tool for agency and advocacy, it can also lead to misunderstanding and exploitation.

Storytelling rights is notably important in the genre of personal experience narrative. Academic disciplines such as performance, folklore, literature, anthropology, Cultural Studies and other social sciences may involve the study of storytelling rights, often hinging on ethics.

## Other specific applications

* Narrative environment is a contested term  that has been used for techniques of architectural or exhibition design in which 'stories are told in space' and also for the virtual environments in which computer games are played and which are invented by the computer game authors.
* Narrative film usually uses images and sounds on film (or, more recently, on analogue or digital video media) to convey a story. Narrative film is usually thought of in terms of fiction but it may also assemble stories from filmed reality, as in some documentary film, but narrative film may also use animation.
* Narrative history is a genre of factual historical writing that uses chronology as its framework (as opposed to a thematic treatment of a historical subject).
* Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.
* Metanarrative, sometimes also known as master- or grand narrative, is a higher-level cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience you've had in life. Similar to metanarrative are masterplots or “recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life.”
* Narrative photography is photography used to tell stories or in conjunction with stories.

## See also

* Jonbar hinge
* *Stalin's Missed Chance*
* *What If? (essays)*

## Further reading

* Chapman, Edgar L., and Carl B. Yoke (eds.). *Classic and Iconoclastic Alternate History Science Fiction*. Mellen, 2003.
* Collins, William Joseph. *Paths Not Taken: The Development, Structure, and Aesthetics of the Alternative History*. University of California at Davis 1990.
* Darius, Julian. "58 Varieties: Watchmen and Revisionism". In *Minutes to Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen*. Sequart Research & Literacy Organization, 2010. Focuses on Watchmen as alternate history.
* Robert Cowley (ed.), *What If? Military historians imagine what might have been*. Pan Books, 1999.
* Gevers, Nicholas. *Mirrors of the Past: Versions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy*. University of Cape Town, 1997
* Hellekson, Karen. *The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time*. Kent State University Press, 2001
* Keen, Antony G. "Alternate Histories of the Roman Empire in Stephen Baxter, Robert Silverberg and Sophia McDougall". *Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction* 102, Spring 2008.
* McKnight, Edgar Vernon, Jr. *Alternative History: The Development of a Literary Genre*. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994.
* Nedelkovh, Aleksandar B. *British and American Science Fiction Novel 1950–1980 with the Theme of Alternative History (an Axiological Approach)*. 1994 (in Serbian), 1999 (in English).
* Rosenfeld, Gavriel David. *The World Hitler Never Made. Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism*. 2005
* Rosenfeld, Gavriel David. "Why Do We Ask 'What If?' Reflections on the Function of Alternate History." *History and Theory* 41, Theme Issue 41 (December 2002), 90–103
* Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. "What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel." *American Studies* 30, 3–4 (Summer 2009), 63–83.
* Singles, Kathleen. *Alternate History: Playing With Contingency and Necessity*. De Gruyter, Inc., 2013

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