Learn English – word for the telling of a story within a story

single-word-requests

Specifically, I am thinking of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which there is a 3rd person narrator referring to the Ancient Mariner who is telling a story to somebody else. The whole story is basically the Ancient Mariner's but told in this fashion via a 3rd person.

Example:

The literary work used _______ ; a method of telling a story within a story

Best Answer

A story within a story might seem a bit simplistic but hits the nail on the head. The Wikipedia page also refers to the phenomenon as a 'nested story'.

If you want to seem a bit more academic, then the term I recommend is embedding.

The most widely-accepted use of the term 'embedding' in the context of narrative theory is to designate the literary device of the 'story within a story', the structure by which a character in the narrative text becomes the narrator of a second narrative text, framed by the first one

(Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory)

The same encyclopaedia also talks about 'frame theory' which is worth a read.

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