No abstract

As an inventor of imaginary worlds, the storyteller's task is to create and sustain narrative illusions. However illusory these worlds may be, their inhabitants, the characters of the story, must be infused with a richness and fullness that gives the st0ry':j world a reality apparently independent of the storyteller. For children, learning to tell stories entails seeing the world in sucessively different ways. During the first stage of this process, the child, at the age of one, comments only on actual objects or events directly before him or her. By the age of three, however, the child can generate stories which speculate about possible events and imaginary characters. It is this passage from the real to the hypothetical-from what is to what may be-that makes possible the construction of narrative worlds.The evolution of storytelling capacities in young children, then, represents a shift from the given world of manipulable objects, pragmatic actions,