This study looks at how oral histories are constructed and how they should be interpreted, and argues for a deeper understanding of their oral and social characteristics. Oral accounts of past events are also guides to the future, as well as being social activities in which tellers claim authority to speak to particular audiences. Like written history and literature, orality has its shaping genres and aesthetic conventions and, likewise, has to be interpreted through them. The argument is illustrated through a wide range of examples of memory, narration and oral tradition, including many from Europe and the Americas, and with a particular focus on oral histories from the Jlao Kru of Liberia, with whom Elizabeth Tonkin has carried out extensive research. Tonkin also draws on and integrates the insights of a range of other disciplines, such as literary criticism, linguistics, history, psychology, and communication and cultural studies.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Elizabeth Tonkin investigates the construction and interpretation of oral histories.

In recent years controversy has surrounded the narrative turn in history and the historical turn in fiction. This book clarifies what is at stake, tracing connections between historiography and life-writing, arguing that the challenges posed in representing the past illuminate issues which are central to all literary narrative.

The current environmental crises demand that we revisit dominant approaches for understanding nature-society relations. Narrating Nature brings together various ways of knowing nature from differently situated Maasai and conservation practitioners and scientists into lively debate. It speaks to the growing movement within the academy and beyond on decolonizing knowledge about and relationships with nature, and debates within the social sciences on how to work across epistemologies and ontologies. It also speaks to a growing need within conservation studies to find ways to manage nature with people. This book employs different storytelling practices, including a traditional Maasai oral meeting—the enkiguena—to decenter conventional scientific ways of communicating about, knowing, and managing nature. Author Mara J. Goldman draws on more than two decades of deep ethnographic and ecological engagements in the semi-arid rangelands of East Africa—in landscapes inhabited by pastoral and agropastoral Maasai people and heavily utilized by wildlife. These iconic landscapes have continuously been subjected to boundary drawing practices by outsiders, separating out places for people (villages) from places for nature (protected areas). Narrating Nature follows the resulting boundary crossings that regularly occur—of people, wildlife, and knowledge—to expose them not as transgressions but as opportunities to complicate the categories themselves and create ontological openings for knowing and being with nature otherwise. Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

The relationship between fiction and historiography in Francoist Spain (1939–1975) is a contentious one. The intricacies of this relationship, in which fiction works to subvert the regime’s authority to write the past, are the focus of David K. Herzberger’s book. The narrative and rhetorical strategies of historical discourse figure in both the fiction and historiography of postwar Spain. Herzberger analyzes these strategies, identifying the structures and vocabularies they use to frame the past and endow it with particular meanings. He shows how Francoist historians sought to affirm the historical necessity of Franco by linking the regime to a heroic and Christian past, while several types of postwar fiction—such as social realism, the novel of memory, and postmodern novels—created a voice of opposition to this practice. Focusing on the concept of writing history that these opposing strategies convey, Herzberger discloses the layering of truth and meaning that lies at the heart of postwar Spanish narrative from the early 1940s to the fall of Franco. His study clearly reveals how the novel in postwar Spain became a crucial form of dissent from the past as it was conceived and used by the State. Making a decisive intervention in the debate about the ways in which narration determines both the meaning and truth of history and fiction, Narrating the Past will be of special interest to students and scholars of the politics, history, and literature of twentieth-century Spain.

The relationship between fiction and historiography in Francoist Spain (1939–1975) is a contentious one. The intricacies of this relationship, in which fiction works to subvert the regime’s authority to write the past, are the focus of David K. Herzberger’s book. The narrative and rhetorical strategies of historical discourse figure in both the fiction and historiography of postwar Spain. Herzberger analyzes these strategies, identifying the structures and vocabularies they use to frame the past and endow it with particular meanings. He shows how Francoist historians sought to affirm the historical necessity of Franco by linking the regime to a heroic and Christian past, while several types of postwar fiction—such as social realism, the novel of memory, and postmodern novels—created a voice of opposition to this practice. Focusing on the concept of writing history that these opposing strategies convey, Herzberger discloses the layering of truth and meaning that lies at the heart of postwar Spanish narrative from the early 1940s to the fall of Franco. His study clearly reveals how the novel in postwar Spain became a crucial form of dissent from the past as it was conceived and used by the State. Making a decisive intervention in the debate about the ways in which narration determines both the meaning and truth of history and fiction, Narrating the Past will be of special interest to students and scholars of the politics, history, and literature of twentieth-century Spain.

In the 1990's, South Africa surprised the world with a peaceful, negotiated transition from armed conflict to an inclusive democracy. This was followed by the ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to confront and work through a troubled past. The search for truth and reconciliation in South Africa, however, is far from completed; the country is in many ways still burdened by unresolved individual and collective traumas. In this book, two academics from the University of Cape Town, one a psychologist and the other a literary scholar, explore the importance of narrative as a way of working through trauma. Although written from within a South African context, the work has a much wider relevance. It offers illuminating perspectives on the process of narrating our healing: the sharing of personal narratives, the appropriation of literary narratives, and above all, the re-creating of life narratives shattered by trauma. It is a book about the search for meaning when all meaning seems to have been lost; it deals with the overwhelming nature of traumatic suffering, yet offers some hope of healing.The book is remarkably overarching, tailored to the needs of scientists and practitioners in the fields of psychology, social work, education and literature. It offers a strong message to all individuals and nations who live in an atmosphere of blame, shame and hopelessness. - Yuval Wolf, Professor of Psychology and Dean of Social Sciences, Bar-Ilan University.Narrating Our Healing is a good book in the widest sense of that adjective: it is well constructed, meticulously researched, and likely to deepen understanding of the difficult but profoundly important subject of trauma and how to address it. It is something like a handbook for living with suffering – both one's own and that of others. To have constructed a text that can serve such a purpose is a profoundly admirable achievement. Annie Gagiano, LitNet.It is a timeous and exciting study that should be essential reading for anyone grappling with our present, our past and our future. - Andrè P Brink – South African and international authorThis is one of the best books I have ever read on healing deep wounds.- Vamÿk D. Volkan, M. D. Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.We need to know the truth about what happened in South Africa during the Apartheid years. Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela have given us the tools to face that challenge. - Rolf Wolfswinkel, Professor of Modern History, New York University.

Narrating Reality offers a provocative and original critique of nineteenth-century British realist fiction and our ways of understanding it. Paying close attention to the role of the narrator, Harry E. Shaw challenges the denigration of realism that has become a critical orthodoxy in recent decades. Drawing on such thinkers as Erich Auerbach, Jürgen Habermas, and J. L. Austin, Shaw contends that realist novels claim not to replicate the world in their pages or to offer transparent access to it, but to involve readers in a process of narrative understanding adequate to grasping the complexities of life in history. Seen in this light, the works of such novelists as Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, as they depict their own and other cultures and strive to imagine regions of freedom in the dense and constricting web of history, gain a new interest.

A thrilling story of scientific detective work and medical potential that illuminates the newly understood role of microglia—an elusive type of brain cell that is vitally relevant to our everyday lives. “The rarest of books: a combination of page-turning discovery and remarkably readable science journalism.”—Mark Hyman, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED Until recently, microglia were thought to be helpful but rather boring: housekeeper cells in the brain. But a recent groundbreaking discovery has revealed that they connect our physical and mental health in surprising ways. When triggered—and anything that stirs up the immune system in the body can activate microglia, including chronic stressors, trauma, and viral infections—they can contribute to memory problems, anxiety, depression, and Alzheimer’s. Under the right circumstances, however, microglia can be coaxed back into being angelic healers, able to make brain repairs in ways that help alleviate symptoms and hold the promise to one day prevent disease. With the compassion born of her own experience, award-winning journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa illuminates this newly understood science, following practitioners and patients on the front lines of treatments that help to “reboot” microglia. In at least one case, she witnesses a stunning recovery—and in others, significant relief from pressing symptoms, offering new hope to the tens of millions who suffer from mental, cognitive, and physical health issues. Hailed as a “riveting,” “stunning,” and “visionary,” The Angel and the Assassin offers us a radically reconceived picture of human health and promises to change everything we thought we knew about how to heal ourselves.

This is the first book in English to focus on the Theater of Narration, a genre characterized by narrators who write and perform works that revisit historical events of national importance from local perspectives.