Story Revolutions

Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age

Helga Lenart-Cheng

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780813948386
• eBook ISBN: 9780813948409
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

Social media has facilitated the sharing of once isolated testimonies to an extent and with an ease never before possible. The #MeToo movement provides a prime example of how such pooling of individual stories, in large enough numbers, can fuel political movements, fortify a sense of solidarity and community, and compel public reckoning by bringing important issues into mainstream consciousness.

In this timely and important study, Helga Lenart-Cheng has uncovered the antecedents of this phenomenon and provided a historical and critical analysis of this seemingly new but in fact deeply rooted tradition. Story Revolutions features a rich variety of case studies, from eighteenth-century memoir collections to contemporary Web 2.0 databases, including memoir contests, digital story-maps, crowd-sourced Covid diaries, and AI-assisted life writing. It spans the Enlightenment, the 1930s, and the twenty-first century—three historical periods marked by a convergence of mass movements and new methods of data collection that led to a boom in activism based in the aggregation and communication of stories. Ultimately, this book offers readers a critical perspective on the concept of community itself, with incisive reflections on what it means to use storytelling to build democracy in the twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Toward Collective Intimacy
• 2. Early Story Collections: Setting the Stage
• 3. Libraries of Human Experience
• 4. To-Gather in Time
• 5. To-Gather in Space
• 6. Stories and Statistics
• Postscript: Toward Algorithmic Collectives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index