Storytelling and Drama

Exploring Narrative Episodes in Plays

Author

Hugo Bowles | University of Rome 'Tor Vergata'

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027233400 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027288691 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

How do characters tell stories in plays and for what dramatic purpose? This volume provides the first systematic analysis of narrative episodes in drama from an interactional perspective, applying sociolinguistic theories of narrative and insights from conversation analysis to literary dialogue. The aim of the book is to show how narration can become drama and how analysis of the way a character tells a story can be the key to understanding its role in the unfolding action. The book’s interactional approach, which analyses the way in which the characteristic features of everyday conversational stories are used by dramatists to create literary effects, offers an additional tool for dramatic criticism. The book should be of interest to scholars and students of narrative research, conversation and discourse analysis, stylistics, dramatic discourse and theatre studies.

Winner of 2012 Esse Book Award for Language and Linguistics

[Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 8] 2010. ix, 216 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.8

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | p. ix

Introduction | pp. 1–6

Chapter 1. Narrative and dramatic discourse | pp. 7–30

Chapter 2. An interactional approach to storytelling | pp. 31–48

Chapter 3. Analysing and classifying stories | pp. 49–66

Chapter 4. Tellability: Discourse features and strategies | pp. 67–91

Chapter 5. Small stories | pp. 93–118

Chapter 6. Remembering and dreaming | pp. 119–144

Chapter 7. Challenging stories | pp. 145–169

Chapter 8. Being the narrator | pp. 171–193

Chapter 9. Conclusions | pp. 195–202

Index | pp. 211–216

“Bowles's work provides invaluable insights into dramatic performances. The book is replete with important sources and explanations, and I recommend it to researchers and students of dramatic performances, oral tradition, folklore, and anthropology of verbal art. The book is analytical and intriguing, and Bowles articulates his arguments clearly and cogently. Bowles's model of analyzing performance with attention to the communicative interaction could easily be applied to ethnographic studies of verbal art forms not only in the Western world, but also in non-Western communities, especially in oral societies where oral forms obscure the dialogical complexity of storytelling.”

Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler, Western Michigan University, in Comparative Drama, Vol. 44(3): 359-361, 2010

“Linguistic approaches to talk deserve a more central place in the study of plays, and works such as Bowles’s provide a compelling demonstration of why. A contribution to the stylistics of drama as well as its criticism, Storytelling and Drama is an important and worthy successor to Deirdre Burton’s Dialogue and Discourse (1980) and Vimala Herman’s Dramatic Discourse (1995).”

Susan Mandala, University of Sunderland, in Modern Drama, 54:1 (2011)

Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

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Beville, Aoife

2021. “An Infinite and Endless Liar”: Paroles as a Case Study of the Pragmatics of Lying in Shakespeare. Linguæ & - Rivista di lingue e culture moderne 20:2

Hu, Po, Min-Lie Huang & Xiao-Yan Zhu

2014. Exploring the Interactions of Storylines from Informative News Events. Journal of Computer Science and Technology 29:3 ► pp. 502 ff.

Ingham, Michael

2019. “Admit me Chorus to this history”: Shakespeare’s M.C.s and Choric Commentators—How Medieval, How Early Modern?. Neophilologus 103:2 ► pp. 255 ff.

Mandala, Susan

2023. Stylistics, pop culture, and educational research. English Text Construction 16:2 ► pp. 144 ff.

McIntyre, Dan

2011. The year’s work in stylistics 2010. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 20:4 ► pp. 347 ff.

Oropeza-Escobar, Minerva

2022. Direct reported speech as a frame for implicit reflexivity. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 481 ff.

Xiang, Dingding

2015. Exploring Narrations in Drama: An Evolving Framework. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 8:3 ► pp. 471 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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