Multiple Normalities ― Making Sense of Ways of Living

Multiple Normalities: Making Sense of Ways of Living enhances sociological understandings of normality by illustrating it with the help of British novels. Barbara A. Misztal conceptualizes the notion of normality as the frame through which people see and interpret their particular historical circumstances. Assuming that literature constitutes a kind of knowledge about the experience of the social world which is complementary to sociological knowledge, it investigates the representations of normality in prize-winning novels published between 1950 and 1970 and between 1990 and 2010. Multiple Normalities analyzes the novels in terms of how their central images of normality demonstrate commonalities and differences between the meanings of normality in the two different periods, as well as changes in the experience of a sense of normality in the last sixty years. Misztal, by illustrating the emergence of multiple normalities, demonstrates the transformation of ways in which we give meaning to the world.

Barbara A. Misztal is Professor of Sociology at Leicester University, UK. She is the author of The Challenges of Vulnerability (2011), Public Intellectuals and the Public Good (2007), Social Theories of Remembering (2003), Informality, Social Theory and Contemporary Practice (2000), and Trust in Modern Society (1996).