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Elizabeth A. Trembley

Until now, Michael Crichton's many readers have had nowhere to turn for more information on one of America's most popular novelists. This companion features clear analyses of Crichton's life and literary influences, as well as chapter on each of his 10 major novels to date. It will help Chrichton's readers learn more about how significant events in his life affected the development of his fiction and literary style and how the heritage of popular fiction, including mystery, gothic, adventure, and science fiction, influenced his writing. This study provides close textual analysis of each novel, by focusing on plot, character development, theme, and critical interpretation. . This study analyzes Crichton's novels from the Andromeda Strain (1969) to The Lost World (1995). It features a clear, user-friendly organization, with two general chapters on Crichton's life and literary heritage, and one chapter on each of his novels. For ease of use by the reader, each chapter is subdivided into section on general critical analysis, plot, theme, character development, and alternative perspectives on the novel that offer additional insight. The author shows how each of Crichton's novels incorporates a theme or debate from current culture and how his visions of genetically engineered dinosaurs, killer viruses from outer space, and deadly relations in international business have become part of American culture. This study will help the reader to understand the important issues raised by Crichton's fiction and to apply critical insight to an examination of those issues. No secondary school, public library, or college library should be without this first serious examination of the works of Michael Crichton.

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Samah Selim

"This book places the field of modern Arabic literature studies in the context of contemporary debates in the humanities about the relationship between narrative, history and ideology. In this sense, it addresses pressing issues raised by literary theory, literary history and postcolonial studies, and grounds these broader discussions in a study of a particular narrative genre - the novel - as it has been constructed and produced over a century in a local/global context. The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways in which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth-century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that inscribed bifurcated narrative and social geography are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape the Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context, rather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European literary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history, as well as to theoretical questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jamey Heit

"This critical analysis of Calvin and Hobbes explores Calvin's world as an intertextual space, revealing a deep reservoir of meanings. Close readings of individual strips highlight the profundity of Calvin's world with respect to a number of life's big questions, including what an individual values, friendship, God, death, and other struggles in life"--Provided by publisher.

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Amit Goswami, with Maggie Goswami

You may not qualify as a scientist, but you love reading science fiction and are intrigued by problems of time, space, mind, and reality. You'd like nothing better than to explore the solar system, travel to the stars, and really penetrate the mysteries of hyperspace, curved space, black holes, and supernovae. The Cosmic Dancers will take you through the most challenging concepts of modern physics with the aid of examples from such masters of science fiction as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, and Ursula K. Le Guin, not to mention their predecessors H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Cyrano de Bergerac.