Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age

As recent movements such as #MeToo demonstrate, individual stories, pooled together in large enough numbers, can fuel political movements and bring important issues to 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, spanning 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 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.