The Sociolinguistics of Narrative

The study of narrative is no longer a literary preserve, but has emerged as an object of enquiry in a whole range of disciplinary contexts, from sociolinguistics to social anthropology, social psychology and beyond. This is because narrative does not exist only between the covers of books; on the contrary, stories have a pervasive role in our everyday life. From the proliferation of data that sociolinguists and others have gathered from many different contexts, we have ample evidence of just how central narrative discourse is to the fabric of social interaction – whether this is in casual conversations, in legal and medical settings, in the media, in family interactions or at school. So there is no longer much need, at the turn of this new century, to argue the case for the increasing importance of narrative within the social sciences.

Table of contents

 

The Sociolinguistics of Narrative: Identity, performance, culture Joanna Thornborrow and Jennifer Coates	1–16
Narrative as a resource in accounts of the experience of illness Jenny Cheshire and Sue Ziebland	17–40
Storying East-German pasts: Memory discourses and narratives of readjustment on the German/Polish and former German/German border Heidi Armbruster and Ulrike H. Meinhof	41–65
Narrative demands, cultural performance and evaluation: Teenage boys’ stories for their age-peers Nikolas Coupland, Peter Garrett and Angie Williams	67–88
Masculinity, collaborative narration and the heterosexual couple Jennifer Coates	89–106
Contextualizing and recontextualizing interlaced stories in conversation Neal R. Norrick	107–127
Hearing Voices: Evasion and self-disclosure in a man’s narratives of alcohol addiction Dick Leith	129–148
Modes of meaning making in young children’s conversational storytelling Shoshana Blum-Kulka	149–170
Two systems of mutual engagement: The co-construction of gendered narrative styles by American preschoolers Amy Sheldon and Heidi Engstrom	171–192
Narrative and the construction of professional identity in the workplace Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra	193–213
Telling stories and giving evidence: The hybridisation of narrative and non-narrative modes of discourse in a sexual assault trial Sandra J. Harris	215–237
Television news and narrative: How relevant are narrative models for explaining the coherence of television news? Martin Montgomery	239–260
Performing theories of narrative: Theorising narrative performance Terry Threadgold	261–278
References	279–293
Index	295–299