Stories pervade our daily lives, from human interest news items, to a business strategy, to daydreams between chores. Stories are what we use to make sense of the world. But how does this work? This text examines this pervasive human habit and suggests ways to think about how we use stories.

A thrilling and gruesome look at the science that influenced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

An enthralling tale of modern Manchester, told by a writer and journalist who has spent four decades reporting on the movers and the shakers of this unique city, from council leader Sir Richard Leese to Sir Alex Ferguson and Tony Wilson. -- .

An enthralling biography of Daphne du Maurier, the legendary author of novels including Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel.

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

This collection of essays models and refines the study of these complicated volumes. Using extensive textual and bibliographical evidence, it offers stimulating new readings of literature, politics and religion in the early modern period, and promises to make important interventions in the history of the book.

Adam Watt's biography considers Proust's early years of personal and aesthetic experiment, the growth of his masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu and his personal decline due to ill-health.

There are more detailed analyses of Atwood's most influential writing, from her first novels such as Surfacing and The Edible Woman, through the works that ensured her international reputation such as The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride, to her most recent work, Alias Grace and Oryx and Crake.

This introductory study explores Margaret Atwood's versatility as a writer and her use of a variety of novel forms. Atwood's writing from the 1970s to the 1990s is analyzed in order to indicate the significant continuities beneath her constant shifts of emphasis.

This guide helps readers find their way into the writing of one of today's most popular writers. Her work plunges people into the heart of stories, involving them in the process and the pleasure of storytelling. In her fiction, Margaret Atwood dismantles universal truths and leads readers to seek their own answers to the riddles of life.

Margaret Drabble is a writer whose subject matter and technique have developed profoundly since the early sixties: this book draws together the different aspects of her narrative practice, and looks at the increasing flexibility of her narrative methods, both in terms of the kind of narrator used and in the structuring of plot events.

This is the first major study of Mark Z. Danielewski, an emerging, innovative American novelist and a key figure in contemporary literature. It situates his three novels to date in their literary and cultural context, in the process demonstrating why he is such an important and ground-breaking writer. -- .

Booker-shortlisted for "Time's Arrow" and known for his novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and autobiographical works, Martin Amis is one of the influential of contemporary British writers. This guide to Amis' diverse and often controversial work offers an introduction to the contexts and various interpretations of his texts.

Presents a guide to the works of Martin Amis. This work offers an interview with Martin Amis, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. It deals with Amis' themes, genre and narrative technique.

This classic study examines the place of literature within Marxist cultural theory, and offers an assessment of the contributions of previous thinkers to Marxist literary theory.

This book provides a necessary critical reappraisal of one of the most challenging and subversive of nineteenth-century women writers.

Mary Shelley provides a detailed study of the famous author's extensive contribution to the Gothic genre. Angela Wright examines the key novels alongside the short stories, revealing how the Gothic themes and motifs that energised Frankenstein resurface in some of Shelley's later works.

This volume advances Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raises important issues for English Romanticism and women's studies.

An innovative, beautifully written analysis of Mary Shelley's life and works which draws on unpublished archival material as well as Frankenstein and examines her relationship with her husband and other key personalities.