Bowles's work provides invaluable insights into dramatic performances. The book is replete with important sources and explanations, and I recommend it to researchers and students of dramatic performances, oral tradition, folklore, and anthropology of verbal art. The book is analytical and intriguing, and Bowles articulates his arguments clearly and cogently. Bowles's model of analyzing performance with attention to the communicative interaction could easily be applied to ethnographic studies of verbal art forms not only in the Western world, but also in non-Western communities, especially in oral societies where oral forms obscure the dialogical complexity of storytelling.

- Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler, Western Michigan University, in Comparative Drama, Vol. 44(3): 359-361, 2010,

Linguistic approaches to talk deserve a more central place in the study of plays, and works such as Bowles’s provide a compelling demonstration of why. A contribution to the stylistics of drama as well as its criticism, Storytelling and Drama is an important and worthy successor to Deirdre Burton’s Dialogue and Discourse (1980) and Vimala Herman’s Dramatic Discourse (1995).

- Susan Mandala, University of Sunderland, in Modern Drama, 54:1 (2011),