Storytelling and Drama
Exploring Narrative Episodes in Plays
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
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements | p. ix
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Introduction | pp. 1–6
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Chapter 1. Narrative and dramatic discourse | pp. 7–30
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Chapter 2. An interactional approach to storytelling | pp. 31–48
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Chapter 3. Analysing and classifying stories | pp. 49–66
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Chapter 4. Tellability: Discourse features and strategies | pp. 67–91
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Chapter 5. Small stories | pp. 93–118
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Chapter 6. Remembering and dreaming | pp. 119–144
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Chapter 7. Challenging stories | pp. 145–169
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Chapter 8. Being the narrator | pp. 171–193
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Chapter 9. Conclusions | pp. 195–202
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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 (7)
Cited by seven other publications
Mandala, Susan
2023. Stylistics, pop culture, and educational research. English Text Construction 16:2 ► pp. 144 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.
Beville, Aoife
Ingham, Michael
Xiang, Dingding
Hu, Po, Min-Lie Huang & Xiao-Yan Zhu
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 july 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.
Subjects
Literature & Literary Studies
Main BIC Subject
CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
Main BISAC Subject
LAN015000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Rhetoric