Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Contents -- The Book of Jonah: A paradigm of the "hermeneutics of strangeness" -- Homer's portrayal of women: A discussion of Homeric narrative from an oralist point of view -- Orality, literacy, and the "readership" of the early Greek novel -- Memory, fictionality, and the issue of authority: Author-function and narrative performance in Beowulf, Chretien and Malory -- The marvellous North and authorial presence in the Icelandic fornaldarsaga -- Women and Old Norse narrative -- Repainting the lion: Chaucer's profeminist narratives -- The mimesis of change: Gascoigne's Aduentures of Master F.J. (1573) -- Archetextual palimpsests: Compositional structure and narrative self-awareness in L'Astrée and other French baroque novels -- Pragmatism and narratology: The case of Paradise Lost -- "That prerogative over human": Paradise Lost and the telling of divine history -- The beginnings of the epistolary novel in England -- Not being a historian: Women telling tales in restoration and eighteenth-century England -- "Worn by the friction of time": Oral tradition and the generation of the balladic narrative mode -- Contributors -- Author Index -- Subject Index