What do we mean by “narrative”? How is it used as descriptive term? What are its theoretical limits? What social and contextual variations can determine the production and form of situated stories? What are the core components of narrative as a discursive unit and interactional resource? How are related narrative discourse and social context articulated in the building of cultural identities? These questions – related to theoretical, contextual, and cultural issues – underlie this collection, The sociolinguistics of narrative, co-edited by Joanna Thornborrow and Jennifer Coates. The volume includes the latest achievements in theory and practice in narrative analysis from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, aiming to help us to understand “the ways in which narrative constitutes a fundamental resource in social interaction” (p. 2).
There are thirteen chapters. The co-editors' introductory chap. 1 deals with the broad notions of narrative form, function, and contexts in order to provide the common ground for the collection. They consider identity, performance, and culture as the key issues to sociolinguistic work on narrative.
In chap. 2, Jenny Cheshire & Sue Ziebland investigate the stability of the “life story” in the context of illness. In chap. 3, Heidi Armbruster & Ulrike H. Meinhof analyze three versions of the experience of people living on the German-Polish border. In chap. 4, Nikolas Coupland, Peter Garrett, & Angie Williams aim to establish the cultural value of narratives of personal experience that mid-teenage boys created and performed in the classroom settings. In chap. 5, Coates analyzes collaborative narration by a heterosexual couple, arguing that the collaborative construction of conversational narratives is not confined to female speakers. In chap. 6, Neal N. Norrick explores how two tellers (re)contextualize interwoven stories in mutual cooperation, and with others. In chap. 7, Dick Leith focuses on male friendship in terms of how it can support someone struggling to reinvent himself. In chap. 8, Shoshana Blum-Kulka argues that young children's conversational narratives function simultaneously in sociocultural and discursive domains. In chap. 9, Amy Sheldon & Heidi Engstrom show how the activity of interactionally constructing and enacting pretend-play stories can be affected at its core by the community's gender order. In chap. 10, Janet Holmes & Meredith Marra examine the contribution of narrative functions to the construction of professional identities. In chap. 11, Sandra Harris examines different narrative types and structures generated in a single court trial, exploring the presence of hybridization and strategic pressure. In chap. 12, Martin Montgomery outlines aspects of TV news reports in order to propose some principles of non-narrative coherence on which the discourse of TV news reports relies. In chap. 13, Terry Threadgold rounds off the collection and moves closer to the ideological function of narrative discourse.
This volume fully meets its aim of improving readers' understanding of narrative discourse and its social dimensions. It also offers valuable data from numerous contexts, such as workplaces, courtrooms, schools, media, and informal everyday settings. The collection deserves all praise as it contributes substantially to the study of narrative discourse, simultaneously raising a number of relevant questions that open avenues of future research in this field.
