The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Kathryn Harrison's controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours "the age of memoir." And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhance...

This book demonstrates how authors performing the role of a public intellectual discuss ideas and opinions regarding society while using literary strategies and devices in and beyond the text. Their assumed persona thereby reads the world as a book - interpreting it and offering alternative scenarios for understanding it.

Never before have our cities been as important as they are now. The drivers of innovation and growth, they are essential to the prosperity of nations. But they are also destructive, plunging us into housing crises and deepening inequality.

How can we keep the good and break free of the bad?In this bracingly original work of research and analysis, leading urbanist Richard Florida explores the roots of this new crisis and puts forward a plan to make this the century of the fairer, thriving metr...

A quarter of a century on from its original publication, Literary Theory: An Introduction still conjures the subversion, excitement and exoticism that characterized theory through the 1960s and 70s, when it posed an unprecedented challenge to the literary establishment. Eagleton has added a new preface to this anniversary edition to address more recent developments in literary studies, including what he describes as "the growth of a kind of anti-theory", and the idea that literary theory has ...

In Hello Everybody! a bestseller in his native Holland, Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five yearsas a reporter in the Middle East. Young and inexperienced but fluent in Arabic, he speaks to stone throwers and soldiers, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors chronicling first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation and war. But the more he witnesses, the less he understands and he becomes increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he sees on the ground and wha...

This third edition of Hans Bertens bestselling book is an essential guide to the often confusing and complicated world of literary theory. Exploring a broad range of topics from Marxist and feminist criticism to postmodernism and new historicism Literary Theory: The Basics covers contemporary topics including:reception theory and reader response theorythe new criticism of postmodernismthe after theory debatepost-humanism, biopolitics and animal studiesaestheticsLiterary Theory: The Basics hel...