You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Writings on the metropolis generally foreground illimitability, stressing thereby that the urban ultimately remains both illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to demonstrate that mentality as a tool offers orientation in the urban realm. Nora Pleßke develops a model of urban mentality to be employed for cities worldwide. Against the background of the Spatial Turn, she identifies dominant urban-specific structures of London mentality in contemporary London novels, such as Monica Ali's »Brick Lane«, J.G. Ballard's »Millennium People«, Nick Hornby's »A Long Way Down«, and Ian McEwan's »Saturday«.
Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and contro...
Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book’s central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionis...
Drawing from literary and cognitive science approaches, this book investigates contemporary British author Ian McEwan's portrayal of the imagination as a complex cognitive process, a result derived from that process or a social strategy we use for daydreaming, mind-reading, (self)deception and intellectual manipulation.
Alvin, a lawyer who writes on arms control issues, takes an around-the-world tour visiting historical places of importance in human history. For the first time he can experience the planet as a whole seeing the continents unfold below while flying west on daytime flights, bringing him to a higher consciousness of the oneness of humanity. The tour group starts in Japan visiting the Yasukuni Shrine and the A-Bomb Peace Park in Hiroshima and becomes aware of the devastating destruction caused by mankind in wars, and similarly in China, Mongolia, and the Middle East. While visiting in Istanbul, Alvin witnesses another tour guest who works for a U.S. nuclear weapons contractor turn over a gold-se...
None
"The story of how an ordinary man can be driven to the brink of murder and madness by the delusions of another. It begins on a windy summer's day in the Chilterns when the calm, organized life of Joe Rose is shattered by a ballooning accident."--Publisher's description.