Some reviewers of Ackroyd's "History of England" volumes have jumped on him for being flippant about facts — for instance, for ahistorically construing as "English" the various and sundry peoples who have inhabited the land now called England, reverse-engineering history to create a false narrative of continuity.
Instead of forging a grand narrative of continuity, the contributors attempt to piece together the often complex web of factors and events that contributed to developments in literary form and matter - as well as the social and religious changes that literature sometimes helped to occasion.
A more fluid and embodied concept of self and its boundaries can be employed here to suggest a complex narrative of continuities, in which the story goes on, although no longer mainly a story about human subjects.
It is these conventional dualised choices – spirit or matter -- that have framed the central dilemma about death as now conceived in the west: the choice of (narratives of) alienated continuity versus reductive-materialist discontinuity -- the supposed finality of material death, or the narrative of no narratives.
"It's a story of continuity.
Westen and Cohen [ 39] furthermore pointed out a "lack of a coherent life narrative or sense of continuity over time" and – implicitly referring to John Locke's emphasis on memory in the concept of identity – a "loss of shared memories that help define the self over time".
In a recent study, Miller, Condin and colleagues successfully used qualitative methodology to obtain rich and powerful narratives of parents' perspectives of continuity of care for their children with chronic health conditions [ 8].
Several researchers have drawn attention to the importance of personal narratives in achieving continuity in the sense of self (Gattuso 2003; Hildon et al. 2008; Kralik, van Loon and Visentin 2006; Williams 1984).
Joan Didion wrote that moving to Los Angeles from New York disrupted her sense of narrative continuity, mostly because of all that driving, the "seductive unconnectedness" of extended car trips.
Ronald Dworkin applied an idea of narrative continuity to the issue of dementia and advance care directives.
A good deal of contemporary atheism, humanism and materialism expresses only a truncated dualism and disillusioned heavenism, failing to provide alternative reshaping narratives of meaning, comfort and continuity for self and body.
