The three volumes of Time and Narrative (1983–85) were published—and soon translated to English (1984–88)—in a pivotal moment for narrative studies and for narratology. In the middle of the eighties, the interest in narratives began to spread beyond the traditional fields of literary studies and linguistics and to influence almost all humanities disciplines. However, this remarkable expansion of narrative studies is disconnected from the evolution of narratology, which at the same time entered a period of crisis before its revival under the label of postclassical narratology. Indeed, there is a tension between, on the one side, the proliferation of narrative studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and on the other side, the loss of interest in the theorization of narrative forms after its peak in the decades before. At that turning point, most attention was focused on how we use narratives or how they shape reality, and no longer on how narratives are shaped. Yet this introduction intends to show that, unlike many other works that have contributed to what will later be called the narrative shift, Ricœur's legacy may appear in retrospect to be the missing link between classical and postclassical narratology, and between contemporary narratology and the wider field of narrative studies.