The article offers an extensive critical overview of economic research that can be classified into the emerging narrative economics approach. This new research area highlights the economic importance of various narratives and ideas widespread in society. This paper focuses on three main fields of narrative economics research. The first is the study of economic and cultural diversity, which may result from differences in narratives. The second is research on macroeconomic fluctuations, which is conducted using methods of automatic analysis of text corpora, such as news, in terms of their various characteristics (e.g. topic or sentiment). The third field is experiment-based research on the role of narratives in shaping the preferences, behaviour, thinking and decision-making of individuals, in particular by making sense of “raw” data from the world. An in-depth literature review makes it possible to conclude that narratives hold great potential for economics, but problems include an imprecise definition of narrative, unclear causal relationships and economics imperialism. This results from factors such as a superficial, purely quantitative approach to texts as proxies of narratives and a lack of detailed analysis of specific narratives. Borrowing ideas from other disciplines, such as interdisciplinary discourse analysis, may be helpful.