Storytelling and Drama

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

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