Storytelling is as old as human civilization. We tell stories to remember, to construct or reconstruct our own versions of reality, and to make sense of our experience. We use stories to teach, to entertain, and to connect with other people. While people have been telling stories since the dawn of humankind, the systematic study of narrative is a good deal more recent. In the Western world, our notion of what makes a well-made story dates back 2500 years to the ancient Greeks: to Plato and his student Aristotle, especially. So powerful were the theoretical formulations of these two philosophers that nothing interesting emerged in the intellectual examination of narrative until the twentieth century. This unit provides you with the background theory that you need to be able to analyze and assess narrative, particularly narrative produced for children