Auto/Biography 0967-5507 13 1 200503 Sage Publications Sage UK: London, England Book Review: An Important Contribution To the Study of Narrative Narrative analysis: studying the development of individuals in society. C. Daiute and C. Lightfoot, editors, 2004. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage; ISBN 0761927972, pbk, 300 pp., £27.00 MalcolmWagstaffUniversity of Southampton 80 82

80 Book ReviewAn Important Contribution To the Study of NarrativeNarrative analysis: studying the development of individuals in society. C. Daiute and C. Lightfoot, editors, 2004. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage; ISBN 0761927972, pbk, 300 pp., £27.00 SAGE Publications, Inc.2005DOI: 10.1177/09675507050130010502 Malcolm Wagstaff University of Southampton Narrative analysis has an obvious appeal to all of us interested in auto/biography. The use of narratives is one way in which people make sense of life and a central concern of the book is human development seen as social process. Thus, the appeal of narrative analysis to researchers is, according to the editors, its ability to examine people's lives holistically, to examine how social histories not only influence identity and development but also provide insights into the relations between the self and society, and to allow notions of value into the research process. Most of the book, in fact, aims to identify and evaluate the rationales, practices, caveats and values of the many approaches involved in narrative analysis. Its structure is given by three ways of conceptualizing the subject. The first sees nar- rative analysis as a root metaphor. The second recognizes that narratives are culturally developed ways of organizing experience and knowledge, while the third goes further and conceptualizes forms of discourse as embodiments of cultural values and personal subjectivities. Each concept has a separate section. 81 Part I is concerned with literary narratives. It takes seriously the idea that knowledge of the world is constituted and transformed through the use of language in discourse and narrative. The contributors to this section use methods taken from literary criticism to analyse blocks of text in the search for meaning beyond that bestowed by the immediate context and to show how text relates to both authors and readers. But stories are not `life itself' and so the existence of an imaginative element is recognized. Freeman sets out how he came to recognize this as he moved from an analysis of life narratives derived from questionnaires and interviews to an examination of memoirs, autobiographies and other personal documents. Sarben seeks to identify how the readers' attention moves from the printed page to an involvement with both the characters and also their times, past or future. Lightfoot, in turn, examines how historical analysis provides a frame for examining developmental changes in the portrayal of the self in fictional stories produced by contemporary adolescents, while Lee et al. explore how the repertoire of traditional Afro-American narratives appears to influence the stories written by children from that background. In Part II the contributors focus on the way in which the construction of narratives takes place through conversations conducted in particular con- texts and expose the danger of losing the most revealing information when analysis separates content from the way in which narratives are expressed. Daiute demonstrates, through an analysis of the auto/biographical and fictional writing of 7 to 10 year old children, how – even at an early age – narrating is a form of social positioning and that power relations are important. Bamberg argues that since narratives are interactively con- structed, they should not be regarded as transparent windows into the speaker's mind, subjectivity and lived experience. An analysis of position- ing is required. This is where discursive psychology comes in, as Stanley and Billig show. Nelson argues that the interactions of very young children with parents and others produce forms of `narrativizing', even in the crib and precede their functional use. Part III deals with how individuals come to know themselves within a larger context and whether they can construct narratives which run counter to the culturally received or dominant ideas of, for example, iden- tity, gender and mental health. Carney reveals that the personal narratives of Holocaust survivors often adhere to the normative expectations of resilience and transcendence, but that some do not. Similarly, Stewart and Malley identify features in the narratives of nine women graduates which have been largely ignored or submerged in the official history of their gen- eration. The use of counter-narratives to construct alternative identities to those imposed by society at large is revealed by Solis' study of Mexican immigrants to New York City. Both Solis and Gergen show that personal stories are malleable and multifaceted. They can be changed, for 82 example, when the narrator is faced with an unwanted response from a listener or when they desire to preserve a particular form of identity. On the other hand, as Gergen points out, some stories achieve such a settled form that the tellers can no longer revise them. Chandler et al., however, tackle the intriguing question of whether a sense of core personal identity can be retained in the face of evidence for apparent change. The book fulfils its purpose admirably. A variety of forms of narrative analysis are presented and their utility demonstrated. Many readers will be stimulated to experiment with narrative analysis themselves. However, the detail of the case studies tends to be overwhelming, unless one is interested in a particular psychological or sociological field. Skipping is advised, using the introduction and the admirable summaries at the beginning of each section. I would have welcomed a typology of forms of narrative analysis near the beginning of the book, instead of discover- ing it towards the end in the contribution by Chandler et al. Something like Solis's guidelines for the novice analyst could also have been provided earlier, perhaps in an identified sub-section. The general sections of these two chapters are perhaps the place to start for those who think narrative analysis might be useful to their research but have no experience with it.