Letting Stories Breathe
A Socio-Narratology
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Prologue
Introduction: Six Stories about Stories
1 The Capacities of Stories
2 Stories at Work
3 Dialogical Narrative Analysis as a Method of Questioning
4 Dialogical Interpretation and Stories’ Particular Truth
5 Exemplars of Dialogical Narrative Analyses
6 How Stories Can Be Good Companions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Glossary
Index
“This is a powerful book. Arthur Frank already has a reputation as a sophisticated and sensitive interpreter of how stories shape human experience, and Letting Stories Breathe will cement his legacy. Moving beyond his important earlier work on illness stories, Frank outlines both a general theory (socio-narratology) and a method (dialogic narrative analysis) for understanding and studying ‘how stories act’ in the lives of individuals and groups. His writing is consistently clear and concise as well as, at times, moving and deeply personal, conveying in its style and language the very ethical commitments that are central to the argument of the book. Frank is himself a good storyteller and he weaves argument and illustration together in just the right balance.”
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Sociology: General Sociology
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