This volume contains a transcript of the original French text and an English translation of the six manuscripts of Lamarck in the library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The first manuscript, a lecture on Gall’s conception of the human brain, is of unusual interest because so little is known concerning Lamarck’s medical education. The sixth manuscript contains an account of an eighteenth century botanical excursion. A few of the drawings which accompany the text of one of the manuscripts are reproduced, and a general account of the various manuscripts, with Crookshank’s comparison of the life-plans of Lamarck and Darwin, is given in the Introduction.

During 1935 Dr. Neal Albert Weber, a pupil of Professor Wheeler’s, collected in Trinidad, B. W. L, the entire personnel of two large ant-colonies which contained unprecedented numbers of anomalous individuals. The present volume deals with the smaller colony, which is that of a fungus-growing (Attine) ant, Acromyrmex octospinosus Reich. This contains only 164 anomalous individuals, but fifty-three of these are of unusual interest both because they are quite unlike any previously observed among ants or indeed among any other social insects, and because they contain the solutions of the problems of caste determination in ants which have been bothering students of ants for the past half century.

Retelling performances, collecting things, reading traces, mapping memories, gaming autobiographies: in European and Anglo-American theater since the turn of the millennium, a range of new nonliterary narrative practices such as these have taken root. Unable to be subsumed under a well-established narratological, dramatic, or postdramatic perspective, they call for a reexamination of the relationship between performance and narration. Performing Stories seeks to reconceptualize narrative against the backdrop of innovative theater formats such as collective storytelling games, theater installations, extensive autobiographical performances, immersive role-playing, and audio-video walks.


Nina Tecklenburg’s focus lies on narration less as literary composition than as sensate, embodied cultural practice—a participatory and open process that fosters social relationships. She gives central importance to the forces of narration that create and undo culture and politics. A foundational new book, Performing Stories presents a groundbreaking transdisciplinary perspective through new approaches that are stimulating to performance studies, narrative and cultural theory, literary criticism, and game and video studies.