Product Description: From T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney to C. S. Lewis’s Aslan, modern writing has been filled with strange new hybrid human-animal creatures. Feeding on consumer society, these ‘modern primitive’ figures often challenge mainstream ideals by discovering wealth in habitats and resources rather than in economic exchange...read more

Product Description: The politicised interpretation of literature has relied on models of economic and social structures that oscillate between idealized subversion and market fatalism. Current anthropological discussions of mixed gift and commodity economies and the segmented politics of house societies offer solutions to this problem and suggest invaluable new directions for literary studies...read more

Product Description: This small collection of stories that were published between 1938 and 1980 includes a remarkable narrative range, from the closely observed realism of “Rough Answer,” Sheila Watson’s first story, through four stories which represent members of the family of Sophocles’ Oedipus as contemporary and naturalized, to the ritualized mystery of “And the Four Animals...read more

Product Description: Modernism is one of the great manifold movements in literature and the arts. Responding with magnificent independence to inherited values and tastes, and with radical novelty to the future, varieties of modernism anxiously express both the ends of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of Postmodernism, and thus the feeling of a crisis that continues to haunt contemporary life...read more

Product Description: Bertram Brooker (1888-1955) was better known as a painter than a writer, yet his first novel, Think of the Earth, won the prestigious Governor General's award. Set in the west, "Think of the Earth" explores the metaphysical quandary of Tavistock, the main character: Is it possible to commit a perfectly innocent murder? Despite the award, the novel was never reprinted and became a rare book, obtainable only through archival copies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Our lives are increasingly dominated by new forms of image, sound, data, and language media. Marshall McLuhan called this new order of things the Global Village, and he strove to be true to it as the media-popular `McLuhan.' Having little use for traditional critical forms or values, and courting instead the discourses of popular culture and big business, McLuhan displayed the authentic, ambivalent place of critical self-reflection in our media-centred world...read more