This series takes young readers to the first step in literary criticism, drawing their attention to pre-reading contexts with the understanding that readers create assumptions before even opening the book.
A Reader's Guide to the Nineteenth-Century English Novel examines the values of Victorian society—values that arose from widely held assumptions about the relative importance of birth and money, the power of the aristocracy, the place of the Church of England. Only with an understanding of the basic assumptions that shaped the world of Austen and Thackeray are readers able to appreciate the significance of a governess rising to be mistress of a large estate while a lady drops into barely genteel poverty in Emma, or of Becky Sharpe's statement that she "could be a good woman" on five thousand a year—a fortune—in Vanity Fair.
Shlapentokh undertakes a dispassionate analysis of the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-communist decade. Without overlooking its repressive character, he treats the USSR as a "normal" system that employed both socialist and nationalist ideologies for the purposes of technological and military modernization, preservation of empire, and expansion of its geopolitical power. Foregoing the projection of Western norms and assumptions, he seeks to achieve a clearer understanding of a civilization that has perplexed its critics and its champions alike.
This book is designed to serve as a companion to Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2005), and covers the remaining two main branches of fantastic fiction, fantasy and supernatural horror. Critics have argued for years about precisely where the borderlines should be drawn within fantastic fiction as a whole, but some broad assumptions can be made, although even in these cases there are numerous exceptions to the rule.
In this richly detailed analysis, Barbara Von Eckardt lays the foundations for understanding what it means to be a cognitive scientist. She characterizes the basic assumptions that define the cognitive science approach and systematically sorts out a host of recent and the controversies surrounding them. Von Eckardt takes issue with those who argue that there is no agreed-upon research paradigm and agreed-upon set of assumptions or methods in cognitive science, and with those who believe that the field should not be so committed. She argues that there is indeed a framework of shared commitments that includes basic questions guiding research, substantive assumptions constraining how those questions are to be answered, and methodological assumptions about how to find those answers.
