Erving Goffman (1922-82) was an inspirational thinker, and one of the giants of 20th century sociology. Several of his books, notably The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961), Relations in Public (1963), Stigma (1963) and Gender Advertisements (1979) are acknowledged as modern classics. Goffman fundamentally revised how we think of social life. After him, the study of social encounters, behavior in public, the construction and deconstruction of the self, stigma and forms of everyday communication, were never the same again.

Without being obviously attached to any discrete research tradition, Goffman drew from the best thought on social interaction, applied it in his fieldwork, and produced a richly satisfying and extraordinarily influential approach to making sense of social life. He was a sociological virtuoso, producing unmatched insights into how life with others is sustained and why forms of interaction break down or cause personal damage.

This unparalleled collection, edited by two acknowledged international experts on Goffman, produces a unique reference resource for researchers and students. It consists of the main critical responses to Goffman's oeuvre, offering readers a distillation of the main themes in Goffman's work and explaining how these themes relate to contemporary social thought. The collection is systematic and constitutes a unique asset in understanding this searching and wide-ranging thinker.

The four volumes are thematically organized into nine sections:

Section 1: Personal Reminiscences

Goffman became internationally famous during the 1960s and 70s, at a moment when American sociology was growing by leaps and bounds. Although in some ways, an unusually reticent man, Goffman's success made him one of the `faces' of American sociology during these crucial years in the professional formation of the subject. Because Goffman's methods of analysis are so personal to the man himself, this section is a particularly useful guide to elucidating and applying Goffman's ideas.

Section 2: Biography and Career

In this section Goffman's career is systematically and critically presented. Included are reflections on Goffman's relation to the academic community, his central legacies and his highly daring and revisionist attempt to rethink social encounters and social life.

Section 3: Goffman's Sociology & Modern Society

Although Goffman produced one of the most significant and influential of all contemporary approaches to sociology, the application of his ideas to the central questions of the day is often hard to identify. He was never an overtly `political' thinker, nor did he engage in utopian theorizing. In this section, the relevance of Goffman's ideas for understanding modern society is pinpointed. Included are considerations of his dramaturgical method, his place in the politics of 60s Sociology, the relation of his ideas to questions of civility and etiquette and a discussion of how Goffman viewed human nature.

Section 4: Methods

Towards the end of his life Goffman sought to externalize the main methodological themes in his work. These had been mainly implicit in his popular writings in the late 1950s and 60s. However, in books like Forms of Talk (1981) and Frame Analysis (1986) he began to be more concrete about the key methodological elements in his work. This section includes discussions of Goffman's use of the concept of self, outlines the distinctive features of his method and indicates how his thought relates to `common sense'.

Section 5: Textuality

This section continues the theme of Goffman's methodology, by examining how he understood and applied forms of `reading' society and, in turn, how his readings have been `read'. The challenge his work poses to orthodox ethnography, the place of irony in his analysis, the virtuoso character of his sociology and Goffman's innovations and decoding interaction comprise the central themes of this section.

Section 6: Central Sociological Concerns

In this, the most lengthy section of the collection, Goffman's central sociological concerns are investigated. His work on interaction, self, frames, stigma, mental illness and total institutions is critically examined. The section reveals the amazing fertility of Goffman's insights and the astonishing range of his sociological imagination. Above all, a critical understanding of why Goffman is important for sociology, what his achievement constitutes, and the strengths and limitations of his sociology, emerges from these pages.

Section 7: Goffman and the Classical Tradition

Goffman's relation to the classical tradition is explored in this section. Comparisons with the ideas of Cooley, Simmel, Park, Hughes and the Chicago School are identified and elaborated. The section helps readers to understand the nature of the unusual crucible from which Goffman's approach emerged.

Section 8: Goffman and His Contemporaries

Goffman's ideas generated a huge amount of critical discussion in his own lifetime. This section provides readers with a comprehensive guide to Goffman's relationship to the work of Blumer, structuralism, existentialism, Sartre, Elias, Habermas and feminism. Again, the sheer range of Goffman's influence emerges most powerfully.

Section 9: Goffman's Influence on Successors

Although Goffman died in 1982, his work is still a major influence in contemporary social analysis. This section explains how Goffman's ideas have been used in contemporary work on conversation analysis, semiotics, consumer culture, postmodernism and the public sphere.

This magisterial collection is a fitting critical tribute to the sociology of Erving Goffman. It enables readers to fully appreciate the achievement and originality of this seminal thinker.

Introduction - Gary Alan Fine, Philip Manning and Gregory W H Smith
PART ONE: PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
Erving Goffman - Pierre Bourdieu
Discoverer of the Infinitely Small
Erving Goffman - Allen D Grimshaw
A Personal Appreciation
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) - Dean MacCannell
On the Importance of Being Erving - P M Strong
Erving Goffman, 1922-1982
On Erving Goffman - Dell Hymes
Role Models and Role Distance - Gary T Marx
A Remembrance of Erving Goffman
The Passing of Intellectual Generations - Randall Collins
Reflections on the Death of Erving Goffman
The Nature of Goffman - Robert Erwin
PART TWO: BIOGRAPHY AND CAREER
Erving Goffman - Judith Posner
His Presentation of Self
Erving Goffman and the Academic Community - Mark Oromaner
Rebuttal to Oromaner Paper - Judith Posner
Vicissitudes of the Sacred - Paul Creelan
Erving Goffman¿s Sociological Legacies - John Lofland
A View From the Fort - Gaile McGregor
Erving Goffman as Canadian
Baltasound as the Symbolic Capital of Social Interaction - Yves Winkin
An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980 - Jef C Verhoeven
PART THREE: GOFFMAN¿S SOCIOLOGY AND MODERN SOCIETY
Erving Goffman - Laurie Taylor
Other Symptoms of the Crisis - Alvin Gouldner
Goffman¿s Dramaturgy and Other New Theories
The Politics of Sociology - T R Young
Gouldner, Goffman and Garfinkel
Weird but Brilliant Light on the Way We Live Now - Marshall Berman
A Fan Letter on Erving Goffman - Bennett M Berger
Erving Goffman et le Temps du Soupcon - Luc Boltanski
The Underworld-View of Erving Goffman - Alan Dawe
Two on the Aisle - Richard Sennett
The Decline of Civility - Peter K Manning
A Comment on Erving Goffman¿s Sociology
Cold Sweat - Alan Bennett
Embarrassment and Erving Goffman¿s Idea of Human Nature - Michael Schudson
Ethics as Etiquette - Laura Bovone
The Emblematic Contribution of Erving Goffman
PART FOUR: METHODS
Self and the Revolt Against Method - Daniel C Foss
Resemblances - Philip Manning
Understanding Goffman¿s Methods - Robin Williams
Stating the Obvious - Frank Cioffi
What Does Erving Goffman Really Tell Us?
PART FIVE: TEXTUALITY
An Appreciation of Sociological Tropes - Robin Williams
A Tribute to Erving Goffman
Sociology, Rhetoric and Personal Communication - Ricca Edmondson
Goffman¿s Poetics - Paul Atkinson
A Partisan View - Gary Alan Fine and Daniel D Martin
Sarcasm, Satire, and Irony as Voices in Erving Goffman¿s Asylums
Erving Goffman - Patricia Ticineto Clough
Writing the End of Ethnography
Autonomy and Credibility - Ira J Cohen and Mary F Rogers
Voice as Method
Reading Goffman on Interaction - Rod Watson
PART SIX: CENTRAL SOCIOLOGICAL CONCERNS
INTERACTION
Life as Theater - Sheldon L Messinger with Harold Sampson and Robert D Towne
Some Notes on the Dramaturgic Approach to Social Reality
Opening Encounters - Deborah Schiffrin
Couple Tie-Signs and Interpersonal Threat - Gary Alan Fine, Jeffrey L Stitt and Michael Finch
A Field Experiment
The Interaction Order Sui Generis - Anne Warfield Rawls
Goffman¿s Contribution to Social Theory
Analyzing Gender in Public Places - Carol Brooks Gardner
Rethinking Goffman¿s Vision of Everyday Life
Goffman¿s Attitude and Social Analysis - N G Hartland
Goffman and Interactional Citizenship - Paul Colomy and J David Brown
Self
Spontaneous Involvement and Social Life - James M Ostrow
The Self as Work of Art - Alasdair MIntyre
Maximising, Moralising and Dramatising - Alan Ryan
Character is the Fundamental Illusion - Thomas Charles Hood
Goffman, Positivism and the Self - Thomas G Miller
Strangers to Themeselves - Andrew Travers
How Interactants are Other than They Are
Is the Presented Self Sincere? - Efrat Tseelon
Goffman, Impression Management and the Postmodern Self
Toward a Sociology of the Person - Spencer E Cahill
FRAMES
On Goffman¿s Frame Analysis - Fredric Jameson
Frame Analysis of Plea Bargaining - Douglas W Maynard
Negative and Positive Keying in Natural Contexts - Raymond L Schmitt
Preserving the Transformation Concept From Death Through Conflation
Frame Paralysis - Avery Sharron
When Time Stands Still
Incidents, Accidents, Failures - Paul Bouissac
The Representation of Negative Experience in Public Entertainment
Reading Goffman¿s Framing as Provocation of a Discipline - Lawrence Hazelrigg
Stigma, Mental Illness and Total Institutions
Miriam Siegler and Humphrey Osmond
Goffman¿s Model of Mental Illness
The Two Cultures and the Total Institution - Nicholas Perry
Asylums Revisited - Roger Peel, Paul V Luisada, Mary Jo Lucas, Diane Rudisell and Deborah Taylor
Psycho-Medical Dualism - Peter Sedgwick
The Case of Erving Goffman
Goffman, Interactionism, and the Management of Stigma in Everyday Life - Simon Williams
Goffman¿s Concept of the Total Institution - Christie Davies
Criticisms and Revisions
Goffman¿s Asylums and the Social Control of the Mentally Ill - William Gronfein
Goffman¿s Asylums and the Total Institution Model of Mental Hospitals - Raymond M Weinstein
PART SEVEN: GOFFMAN AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
Erving Goffman and the Development of Modern Social Theory - Randall Collins
The Degradation of the Sacred - Paul Creelan
Approaches of Cooley and Goffman
Snapshots `Sub Specie Aeternitatis¿ - Gregory W H Smith
Simmel, Goffman and Formal Sociology
Park, Doyle and Hughes - Gary D Jaworski
Neglected Antecedents of Goffman¿s Theory of Ceremony
Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman - Murray S Davis
Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience
PART EIGHT: GOFFMAN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Action vs. Interaction - Herbert Blumer
Relations in Public - Microstudies of the Public Order by Erving Goffman
Essential Features of Face-to-Face Interaction - George Psathas and Frances C Waksler
`Situation¿ vs `Frame¿ - George Gonos
The `Interactionist¿ and the `Structuralist¿ Analyses of Everyday Life
Sincerity and Politics - J A Hall
`Existentialists¿ vs Goffman and Proust
Frame Analysis Reconsidered - Norman K Denzin and Charles M Keller
A Reply to Denzin and Keller - Erving Goffman
L¿Enfer, c¿est les Autres - P D Ashworth
Goffman¿s Sartrism¿
Goffman as a Systematic Social Theorist - Anthony Giddens
Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation - Emmanuel A Schegloff
Ritual Talk - Phil Manning
Embarrasment and Civilization - Helmut Kuzmics
On Some Similarities and Differences in the Work of Goffman and Elias
Habermas, Goffman, and Communicative Action - James J Chriss
Implications for Professional Practice
Goffman in Feminist Perspective - Candace West
PART NINE: GOFFMAN¿S INFLUENCES ON SUCCESSORS
Erving Goffman¿s Sociology as a Semiotics of Postmodern Culture - Heinz-G[um]unter Vester
Alienation and Everyday Life - Lauren Langman
Goffman Meets Marx at the Shopping Mall
The Linguistic Realization of Face Management - Thomas Holtgraves
Implications for Language Production and Comprehension, Person Perception, and Cross-Cultural Communication
Goffman Against Postmodernism - Michael L Schwalbe
Emotion and the Reality of the Self
Following Goffman, Following Durkheim into the Public Realm - Spencer E Cahill