Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life

This volume focuses on emerging themes in the linguistic study of narrative, especially as it has developed within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, challenge or support moral order, and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. This book makes connections among language, narrative, and social life to illuminate central issues shaping individual identity, society, and culture.
Among the new and developing themes that the distinguished contributors probe are the contributions of narratives in the construction of moral order and of individual and societal identities, remediation through public media, multidimensional conceptions of identity, the importance of context, the roles of truth and deception in varying social practices, and uses of narrative in new media.
This volume developed out of the 2008 GURT.