Books like On the origin of stories by Boyd, Brian

Joseph Campbell’s classic study of myth examines how recurring hero narratives shape human experience and inspire modern storytelling, from ancient folklore to contemporary cinema.

245 p. : 22 cm

The Drama of the Gifted Child explains how repressed emotions from an abusive childhood create lifelong feelings of emptiness and alienation, offering readers a path to reclaim personal truth and essential needs.

The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or supergenre of contemporary writing - feminist fabulation - which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the relationship between women writers and postmodern fiction in terms of outer space and canonical space, Feminist Fabulation is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world women. Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether. Barr offers very specific plans for new structures that will benefit women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and science fiction theory alike. Feminist fabulation calls for a new understanding which enables the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that the literature called "feminist SF" is an important site of postmodern feminist difference. Barr forces the reader to rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just its membership list - and in so doing provides a discourse of this century worthy of a prominent reading by all scholars, feminists, writers, and literary theorists and critics.

How Humans Evolved uses the broad perspective of behavioral ecology, drawing on Robert Boyd's expertise in evolutionary theory and Joan Silk's specialty in primate behavior in a uniquely integrative text. For the Third Edition, the authors have revisited many chapters in depth, added new supplemental readings, and incorporated the latest archaeological findings, including coverage of the fossil cranium Sahelanthropus tchadensis, whose dating was announced in the summer of 2002.