ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by setting the currently popular concept of ‘story’ in a more general perspective through the discussion of some recent work on narrative. It moves on to explaining a view of the self as essentially ‘storied’ – constructed and experienced through self-narratives. The idea of ‘self as story’ both overlaps and also partly contrasts with other models of identity. This usage of ‘story’ is by now pretty much taken for granted as an analytic term across a wide range of social science and humanistic disciplines. Sometimes the label ‘story’ additionally implies the more extreme claim that the theories put forward by the academics are no more authoritative than stories told in any other voices.
