Introduction : Losing the Plot - Tangling with Narrative Complexity

What is narrative? The question lies at the heart of narrative approaches to research. The simplicity of the common response to this question, however, ‘a story with a beginning, a middle and an end’, with its implied coherence, veils significant tensions and ambiguities. This special edition brings together a range of papers from a recent conference that explored some of the uncertainty around the role of coherence in narrative and narrative research. The conference ‘Losing the Plot – Tangling with Narrative Complexity,’ held in Melbourne, in July, 2010 was inspired by a recent publication, Beyond Narrative Coherence (Hyvarinen, Hyden, Saarenheimo and Tamboukou, 2010). This present collection of papers is a response to these questions and ideas from an Australian perspective and it represents a range of disciplinary backgrounds including media and communication, creative writing and psychosocial studies.