Small Stories Research: Tales, Tellings, and Tellers Across Contexts

This collection showcases the diversity and disciplinary breadth of small stories research, highlighting the growing critical mass of scholarship on small stories and its reach beyond discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives.

The volume both takes stock of and seeks to advance the development of small stories research by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg, as a counterpoint to conventional models in narrative studies, one which has accounted for ＂atypical＂ yet salient activities in everyday life, such as fragmentation and open-endedness, anchoring onto the present, and co-constructive dimensions in stories and identities. With data from different languages and contexts, emphasis is placed on the analytical aspects of the paradigm toward producing models for the analysis of structures, textual and interactional choices, and genres of small stories. Chapters on the role and commodification of small stories in digital environments reflect on the paradigm’s recent extension to the analysis of social media communication.

This book will appeal to scholars interested in narrative inquiry and narrative analysis, in such fields as sociolinguistics, literary studies, communication studies, and biographical studies.

Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics, and Co-Director of the Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication, King’s College London. In joint (with Michael Bamberg) and solo work that stretches back to mid-2000s, she developed small stories research as a paradigm for the analysis of everyday life stories and identities.

Korina Giaxoglou is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics & English Language at The Open University, UK. She is the author of the research monograph A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning: Small Stories and Affective Positioning by Routledge.

Sylvie Patron is Associate Professor and Research Supervisor, and Head of the Paris Centre for Narrative Matters, Université Paris Cité, France. She was Vice-President, then President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative from 2017 to 2020.