The fourteen distinguished contributors to this volume explore ways we tell, understand, and use stories. More important, through their exploration they collectively demonstrate that the study of narrative, like the study of other significant human creations, has taken a quantum leap in the modern era. No longer the province of literary specialists who borrow their terms from psychology or linguistics, the study of narrative has become and invaluable source of insight for all the branches of human and natural science. Multidisciplinary in scope, these essays dramatize and and clarify the most fundamental debates about the nature and value of narrative as a means by which human beings attempt to represent and make sense of the world.