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Chapter 4 looks at the phenomenon of a single work that calls itself a library. It considers the Library of Apollodorus as a work that plays on seeming to be a full and complete text while actually containing conspicuous absences to which it consciously draws the reader's attention. It is a mythological compendium that offers moments of recognition that there are other narrative traditions than the present one. It becomes apparent that this Library is, as all other libraries, anything but a complete one.

This chapter focuses on literary critics' thoughts about the American frontier narrative. Scholars such as Henry Nash and Perry Miller declared the nation's relation with nature as the key to its sense of selfhood. Many others believed that the belief in the mythic frontier encouraged political oppression at home and overseas, and also criticized the working language of American studies, proposing to replace the narrative traditions saturated with emotion and poesy with rational analysis.

This chapter analyzes the American frontier thesis as part of changing narrative traditions. It discusses the differences between the views of Frederick Jackson Turner, who emplotted the European occupation of America as the building of a modern democracy from wild nature, and John Dewey, who blamed many of the nation's social ills on frontier excess. The chapter also considers Merle Curti's frontier history, which epitomized the analytic turns as it carried forward the notion that American democracy was a product of American wilderness.

This chapter shows that fame won in battle was a major preoccupation of Indo-European poetic and narrative tradition. Indo-Europeans believed in a kind of afterlife. A limited number of great men — kings, warriors, seers, and even some women associated with them — lived on in the memory of the people, in poem and story. Topics discussed include the origin of humankind, the fates, death, and transcending mortality through fame.

This chapter explores the works of American writers Jack Conroy and Meridel Le Sueur, which focus on the working class of 1920s and 1930s America. Conroy's The Disinherited (1933) uses an episodic narrative structure that creates “skaz”, sketches from “overheard” stories and interrupted autobiography, and then assembles those sketches into a communal tale of political disenfranchisement and burgeoning consciousness. Similarly, Le Sueur's The Girl (1939) presents the suffering of female bodies in hard labor, hunger, childbirth, or partner abuse. She generates an iterative style that rejects the authority of a presiding narrator and emphasizes the narrative dimension of the “contact” between the embodied lives of working-class women. These working-class narratives illustrate orality, folk culture, and the materiality of everyday life through the bodies of working women and men which emerges as a politically engaged, experimental narrative tradition.

Clementina Todesco was born in 1903 in Faller, a remote Alpine village characterized by an extremely rich oral narrative tradition. Within the Fallerese way of life, the stable provided the setting for many of the work and social activities of both family and community. Villagers would gather in the evenings in the stables, where men might repair tools and women could do their spinning or embroidery. While Folktales in America captures a similar talent and love of storytelling in its subject Clementina Todesco, it is a work more formally structured as a scholarly study of one teller and her tales.

This chapter examines the two main narrative traditions of Saraha's tale of enlightenment. It describes the first narrative tradition as the radish girl tale and the second as the female arrowsmith of fletcheress. The first is believed to be an oral tradition from the heartland of Buddha's enlightenment itself or the modern Bodhgaya while the second forms the beginning of the Seven Teaching Currents of tantric instructions formulated by Taranatha. This chapter analyzes the relationship between Saraha's hagiographic tales and his dohā verses.

Chapter 7 addresses female sadhus’ sacred text practices. The chapter discusses “textual” performances centered on recitation of the Râmcaritmânas. A vernacular-language text composed by the medieval poet-saint Tulsidas, and embedded within the broader Râmâyan epic narrative tradition, the Râmcaritmânas presents an important genre of performance in the sadhus’ rhetoric of renunciation. The chapter also examines the strategies by which female sadhus construct themselves as “scriptural”—that is, how they perform a relationship with the literate textual tradition of Tulsidas’ Râmcaritmânas. It looks at their ideas of the text and their adaptations of that idea in performance, and just as significant, argues that the performing of “texts” confers power, authority, and legitimation for female sadhus in asceticism as practiced. The chapter further suggests that in the performing of texts female sadhus draw out and rework concepts that underscore a perspective of asceticism as relational and emplaced in community.

How can the moral ordinary provide a place to critique and contest it? This chapter takes us into a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where parents watch over their critically ill newborn. The parents battle with clinicians over the experimental procedures they ask to be carried out on behalf of their baby. This familiar topic in medical ethics gains moral depth when clinical experiments are embedded within the parents' attempts to transform their family and themselves and to cultivate the kinds of virtues that make them good parents to all their children. The NICU emerges as a moral laboratory where the body as a (metaphorical) machine is debated. One authoritative moral discourse (a spiritual one) is pitted against another (a biomedical one).

This chapter describes the crucial role of Chretien de Troyes's five romances in literary history. Chretien continued traditions of narrative set in motion by the authors of the medieval romances of antiquity, particularly the Roman d'Eneas. He launched, in the form that later generations would take up, two of the most widely developed narrative subjects of medieval and modern literature: the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere and the Grail quest. He was translated or adapted in the Middle Ages by authors writing in German, English, Norse, Swedish, and probably Welsh. Beyond these versions of his works, he exercised a decisive influence on the development of Arthurian romance written in French, both verse and prose, and, through the intermediary of the French tradition, in other major European literatures.

The focus in this chapter is the relationship between the Therīgāthā and the Pāli narrative biographical tradition. This relationship is explored through an analysis of Therīgāthā verses and biographies of nuns with the name Nandā. The extant Therīgāthā has two sets of verses on nuns called Nandā, and the first verse of each is identical. Beginning with the two sets of verses, Alice Collett argues that this possible transmission error has been valorized by the tradition, which adheres to the sacredity of the canon, as verses of two historical disciples called Nandā and from this interpretation two accounts, still just discernible, for two separate Nandās have been inaugurated and instilled into the Pāli textual tradition. One Nandā is the female (half-)sibling of Gotama Buddha, the other is the daughter of a Sakyan called Khema.

This chapter appreciates the way focal things may counterbalance devices. It finds that Borgmann's evaluation of the device paradigm does not always bear out for individual devices. Simply because a technological object can be classified as a device does not necessarily mean that it will have the negative effects on engagement and human relationships that Borgmann's theory predicts; some devices actually foster these values, illustrating the chapter's points with a study done on women's use of telephones. “The machinery that clouds the story of a device does not appear to prevent that device from playing a role in relationship building.” If so, devices under some conditions may be more promising than Borgmann thinks; Michelfelder finds that devices can themselves support focal practices if they are used in a context of narrative and tradition.