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...

Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world's foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world.

According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. In...

The complete guide to doing a literature search and review also contains a wealth of features to calm students overwhelmed at the prospect of doing their dissertation or thesis

In 1995, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of the nation's public face and private parts (as it were), and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite; a military hero whose dying wish was to ...

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...

Does language reflect the culture of a society? Is our mother-tongue a lens through which we perceive the world? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? This title states that contrary to the fashionable academic consensus of today, the answer to all these questions is - yes.

A fresh and innovative perspective on urban issues and creating sustainable cities

In The 15-Minute City: A Solution for Saving Our Time and Our Planet, human city pioneer and international scientific advisor Carlos Moreno delivers an exciting and insightful discussion of the deceptively simple and revolutionary idea that everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be a short walk or bike ride away from home.

This book tells the story of an idea that spread from city t...