“Narrative” appears in the English language in the sixteenth century first as designating a legal document (1537) “which contains a statement of alleged or relevant facts closely connected with the matter or purpose of the document; spec . a statement of the parties to a deed and the cause of its granting” (Oxford English Dictionary) , and then, a few years later (1571), in the more general and nontechnical sense of “An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them.” It is only in the mid nineteenth century (1843) that it enters the vocabulary of literary criticism as designating “The part of a text, esp. a work of fiction, which represents the sequence of events, as distinguished from that dealing with dialogue, description, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary) . The conditions for what counts as a narrative as it appears in these usages are simple and define a phenomenon that is of little intrinsic interest. Certain…