Collaborative storytelling and joint biographies in the contemporary British novel

More about the book

The socio-cognitive dimension of stories has been one of the top priorities of literary scholarship for the last two decades, but more specific forms such as collaborative storytelling have received little scientific attention in both narratology and literary-linguistic studies. Situated in a conversational medium, collaborative storytelling is defined by a dynamic communicative structure due to the number of communication partners and the constant addition of, and, implicitly, discussion of the new elements in the story they co-narrate. ‘Co-narration’ and ‘stance’ are used as key concepts in illustrating how multiple autodiegetic storytellers undertake the joint communicative venture of storytelling to co-construct and co-tell the story together as a narrative group. On this account, the conception of narrative as a collaborative communicative project is examined in light of theories of co-narration, stance, and intersubjectivity at the crossroads of fields such as narratology, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics and discursive psychology. With a particular focus on the relationship between literary discourse and the narrating agents’ intersubjective stances to co-tell the story, this study links aspects of story production and construction to specific mechanisms of collaborative storytelling in six multi-narrator novels in contemporary British fiction.