Introduction

The structural turn in literary criticism began with Russian formalism in the second decade of the twentieth century and spread from literary studies to the humanities in the form of the linguistic turn of the second half of that century. The linguistic turn in the humanities was matched by a post-war enthusiasm for humanistic approaches to the social sciences. Qualitative research methods, which sought to privilege rather than eliminate the subjectivity of data, became both more prolific and more respected. Although the structuralist and humanist traditions were at odds in several significant ways, they were sufficiently similar to facilitate a narrative turn in the human sciences as a whole (Squire, Andrews and Tamboukou 2013). Matti Hyvärinen (2010) identifies four distinct stages within this turn, beginning with literary studies in the nineteen sixties, moving to historiography in the nineteen seventies, social research in the nineteen eighties, and culture itself in the nineteen nineties. Catherine Kohler Riessman (2002) explores the turn in more detail, noting the influence of narrative beyond the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, sociolinguistics, and sociology to the professions of law, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, and social work in the last two decades of the century. As the century changed, the concept of narrative identity – of personality as reducible to or dependent upon autobiographical narrative representation or autobiographical narrative thinking – was adopted by numerous disciplines (Polkinghorne 1988; McAdams 1993).

Criminology has been slow to embrace narrative as a tool for understanding, explaining, and reducing crime and social harm. The initial criminological interest in narrative representation was nonetheless very early, developed in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and focused on the life history. The first sociological life history was William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's (1927) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (first published from 1918 to 1920 in five volumes and then in 1927 in two volumes) and the first to take crime as its subject, Clifford Shaw's (1930) The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story. The Jack-Roller is the life history of ‘Stanley’ (a pseudonym), a twenty-two-year-old man from Chicago with a long record of delinquency from the ages of six to sixteen.