Introduction: Searching for Cultural Memory

This Introduction situates the papers and commentaries of this Special Issue on ‘Narrative and Cultural Memory’ within the context of a new multidisciplinary research literature that suggests localizing memory in culture and, in doing so, focuses on the role of narrative. This literature is viewed against the backdrop of a fundamental critique of the traditional notion of memory as reflecting one strand in the emergence of a new postpositivist cultural research paradigm in the study of memory.