Storytellers of Children's Literature and their Ideological Construction of the Audience David Poveda (bio), Marta Morgade (bio), and Bruno Alonso (bio) Introduction In recent decades there has been renewed social and academic interest in organized storytelling and storytellers in contemporary industrialized societies. Folklorists, storytellers, and other commentators speak of a "revival" of storytelling as manifested in the growing number of storytelling events in different social fields. For example, storytelling is valued as cultural form, maintained through festivals, professional organizations, and public funding schemes for the arts. It is also consumed as entertainment, in stand-up comedy, storytelling cafés and pubs, or formal recitals. Finally, it is a field with professional applications in areas such as therapy, education, or business (Stone 1998; Wilson 2005; Sobol 2008). As a result, there is a line of theoretical and applied scholarship that has attempted to examine this revitalization. This scholarship has been carried out, on one hand, by constructing a coherent portrait of contemporary storytelling in different national and regional contexts, such as Canada (Stone 1998), the United States (Sobol 2008), or Britain and Ireland (Wilson 2005; Harvey 1989); on the other hand, this has been done by developing conceptual tools to assess and train in contemporary storytelling practices (Ryan 2008; De Marinis 1987). In parallel with these developments, since the 1970s linguistic anthropology has moved to performance-oriented forms of narrative analysis (Bauman 1986; Hymes 1981; Kapchan 1995; Finnegan 1992). This paradigm shift, associated with the development of the ethnography of communication, focuses its attention on the production and presentation of narratives as emergent and socially constructed events. From this perspective, full-fledged verbal performances are seen as one end of a continuum of discursive practices in which speech is keyed in special ways (Bauman 1977; Sherzer 2002; see also Wilson 2005). Precisely because speech practices are construed along a continuum, the analytical tools developed to examine the most elaborate forms of verbal art can be applied to a variety of narrative events and linguistic formats. This has allowed ethnographers of communication to legitimately move their attention from formal narratives and storytelling in oral "traditional" societies (e.g., Hymes 1981) to the peripheral "folk traditions" of industrial societies (e.g., Bauman 1986; Harvey 1989) and, finally, to storytelling and narratives in a variety of informal and institutional contexts in contemporary urban settings. In this last development, storytelling to children inside and outside schools has received particular attention (Juzwick and Sherry 2007; Poveda 2003; Casla et al. 2008) and has been an important resource in the revitalization of storytelling (Wilson 2005). Despite this accumulated scholarship, not all potential research questions have received equal attention. When studies focus on storytellers (the only area we will comment on in this paper), certain themes have been consistently explored while others have been neglected. Contemporary storytellers' biographies, identities, and professional trajectories have been the focus of several works (Harvey 1989; Stone 1998; Sobol 2008), but their own theoretical constructions about storytelling and performance as literary events have not received equal interest. This is unfortunate since, as Ruth Finnegan (1992) has pointed out, within the anthropologically and ethnographically based approach to verbal art as subscribed to by many of the authors cited above, issues of local aesthetics and thought "call for specific treatment in that, although in the past usually subordinated to the collection and analysis of textual material, the subject is now starting to be discussed in its own right" (131). Further, there is a potential relationship between storytellers' aesthetics and thoughts and their own (varied) professional, social, and formative trajectories that needs to be empirically and rigorously explored in order to provide a more complete picture of contemporary narrators than is currently available in the literature. In one of the few studies on the topic, Fiona Collins (1996), a professional storyteller and researcher, explored British storytellers' views on how children work with stories. She gathered her data by mailing questionnaires to other storytellers, and her study did not seem to have any clear theoretical conceptualization, so the results hardly stand up to the linguistic anthropological agenda set out by Finnegan and others. In contrast, the relationship between text, author, and reader/audience (and the meaning...