How is the body articulated in language and discourse? How is the body articulated as discourse? How do individuals and the media represent and define relationships between the body and selves? The eleven new chapters in this book explore how 'discourses of the body' - in talk, text and other semiotics - sustain moral, ideological and practical positions. Using a wide range of data from both private and public contexts, Discourse, the Body and Identity brings different forms of linguistic and multi-modal analysis to bear on these questions. It draws on and develops concepts and methods from sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology and cultural theory. Together, these approaches explore body representations and embodied action for the purposes of, for example, instruction, display, and personal story telling. The volume brings together research on representations of bodily ageing, gendered bodies, bodies at risk, ill and disabled bodies, but also bodies at play and narcissistic body.CONTENTS:Acknowledgements - Preface - Introduction; J.Coupland & R.Gwyn - PARTI: THE BODY AS AN INTERACTIONAL RESOURCE - The Body in Action;C.Goodwin - Transcending the Object in Embodied Interaction;J.Hindmarsh & C.Heath - Flirting; A.Radley - PART II: IDEOLOGICALREPRESENTATIONS OF THE BODY - Ageing Bodies, Aged by Culture;M.Hepworth - Tales of Outrage and the Everyday: Fear of Crime andBodies at Risk; M.Tulloch & J.Tulloch - Ageist Ideology and Discourses of Control in Skin Care Product Marketing; J.Coupland - TalkingBodies: Invoking the Ideal in the BBC Naked Programme; A.Jaworski -Bodies Exposed: A Cross-Cultural Semiotic Comparison of Saunas;U.Meinhof - PART III: THE BODY, PATHOLOGY AND CONSTRUCTIONS OFSELFHOOD - Processes of Re-figuration: Shifting Identities in CancerNarratives; R.Gwyn - The Statistical Body; K.Woodward - 'I am Normal on the Net': Disability, Computerized Communication Technologies and the Embodies Self; D.LuptonJUSTINE COUPLAND is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Language andCommunication Research, Cardiff University. She has published widely on lifespan communication, discourse and ritual, and texts of identity. Her books include Language, Society and the Elderly:Discourse, Identity and Ageing, with Nik Coupland and Howard Giles (1991), the Handbook of Communication and Aging Research (co-editorJon Nussbaum (1995) and Small Talk (2000).RICHARD GWYN is Coordinator of the Health Communication ResearchCentre, Cardiff University. He has published articles on discourse, narrative, health in the media, and medical interaction and is the author of Communicating Health and Illness (2002). As a poet and essayist, his recent publications including Walking on Bones (2000),Being in Water (2001) and Lluis Penaranda/Iwan Bala (2001) a critical account of two contemporary artists.