Introduction

Individuals become to some extent their autobiographies and the social stories being told around them, but they become their cultural narratives too. Culture is by definition made up of events, representations and values that are relatively long-lasting and widely distributed. This means that cultural narratives are never just individual. The concept of narrative in the social sciences is notoriously wide in scope, and attention to culture emphasises this breadth. Styles, specific linguistic forms, are a means through which the cultural saturation of narratives becomes manifest, and they are at their most obvious when people are dealing with clearly 'cultural' narratives. The plurality and instability of cultural narrative styles is for most of the writers in this part a guarantee of possibility. Unsurprisingly perhaps, an attention to culture has led them to a perspective on narrative inflected by postmodernism. Contributors display a range of takes on the relationship.