The triumph of narrative : storytelling in the age of mass culture

Summary: In this strikingly original look at modern culture, Robert Fulford pursues an unusual subject across a bizarre landscape whose features include urban legends, The Birth of a Nation, Jack Nicholson, Ivanhoe, TV News, Vladimir Nabokov, sex scandals and gossip, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Fulford sees storytelling as the core of civilized life, the juncture where facts and feeling meet, the bundle in which we wrap truth, hope, and dread. Narrative, he says is how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves - and how we often do all three at once. He distils half a century of experience as a journalist and critic into an account of human lives shaping stories and stories shaping human lives, and he asserts with special passion "the value of those unruly and unaccredited forms of narrative that arise from conversation, in particular the stories, true and untrue, that we tell about ourselves and people we know."