Search results for ""Author Professor Stuart Sim""
Edinburgh University Press The End of Modernity: What the Financial and Environmental Crisis is Really Telling Us
Global financial crisis, global environmental crisis -- what connects them? Stuart Sim claims they are both symptoms of the end of modernity, the cultural system that has prevailed in the West from the Enlightenment onwards. In this provocative book, Sim argues that the modern world's insatiable need for technologically driven economic progress is unsustainable, and potentially destructive of the planet and its socio-economic systems. The new landscape this creates - socially, politically, economically, intellectually - is explored through an interdisciplinary approach, providing a wide-ranging assessment of the collapse of modernity and the challenges it poses us. Sim calls for a radical alteration in our world view and for purposeful changes both to our economic and intellectual life: we need to jettison the free market, rein in conspicuous consumption, reinvigorate public service, and develop talents other than the entrepreneurial if we are to reconstruct our society satisfactorily. Key Features * Brings out the broader cultural dimensions of the global financial crisis * Reveals the contradictions at the heart of modernity and its cult of progress * Offers a thought-provoking interdisciplinary analysis of late modernity and its aftermath * Provides a detailed reassessment of the value of postmodern thought in the new cultural situation * Outlines the ideological adjustments we shall have to make in a post-progress world
£25.11
Edinburgh University Press The Eighteenth-century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues: An Introduction
This study introduces readers to the eighteenth-century novel through a consideration of contemporary social issues. Eighteenth-century authors grappled with very similar problems to the ones we face today such as: what motivates a fundamentalist terrorist? What are the justifiable limits of state power? What dangers lie in wait for us when we create life artificially? The book discusses key authors from Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century to James Hogg in the 1820s, covering the 'long' eighteenth century. It guides readers through the main genres of the period from Realism, Gothic romance and historical romance to proto-science fiction. It also introduces a range of debates around race relations, anti-social behaviour, family values and born-again theology as well as the power of the media, surveillance, political sovereignty and fundamentalist terrorism. Each novel is shown to be directly relevant to some of the most urgent moral issues of our own time. Key Features *Relates the novels of the eighteenth century to current social and political debates *Accessibly and engagingly written for non-specialists *Covers the key authors and texts of the period including Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Pamela, Northanger Abbey, Tristram Shandy and Frankenstein
£23.99
Edinburgh University Press The Lyotard Dictionary
Jean-Francois Lyotard is famed for being one of the most acute observers on the cultural phenomenon of the postmodern, and his ideas resonate throughout the academic world, from philosophy and the social sciences through to literary, media, and cultural studies. Drawing on the internationally-recognised expertise of a multidisciplinary team of contributors, the entries in The Lyotard Dictionary explain all of Lyotard's main concepts, contextualising these within his work as a whole and relating him to his contemporaries. It forms an indispensable guide to this fascinating and hugely influential thinker, demonstrating his continuing significance as a cultural theorist.
£28.99
Edinburgh University Press The Carbon Footprint Wars: What Might Happen If We Retreat from Globalization?
Climate change is acknowledged to be the major problem currently facing the human race, and the need to reduce our carbon footprint becomes ever more urgent as the scientific predictions of the effects of climate change become increasingly dire. Whether we are fully aware of the social and political consequences of striving for a significant reduction is more questionable. The Carbon Footprint Wars identifies the many dangers inherent in the projected solutions - such as retreating from the spread of globalization, the current socio-economic paradigm for world trade. The war of words that is being waged over the appropriate way to deal with our collective carbon footprint has critical implications for us all. Stuart Sim examines the issues in detail, raising questions about the assumptions being made on both sides of the climate change divide. He argues that we must urgently address the problem of how to engineer the best possible trade-off between economic survival and ecological disaster - and he puts forward some radical suggestions about how we should set about doing so. Key Features *Challenges current policies about how to deal with global warming, outlining their potentially disastrous side-effects on society and the environment *Brings out the political complexities of the links between globalization and global warming *Provides a wide variety of case studies *Calls for a radical re-think of West-Third World relations
£28.13
Edinburgh University Press Empires of Belief: Why We Need More Scepticism and Doubt in the Twenty-first Century
This book challenges all forms of fundamentalism and unexamined belief systems from a philosophical and sceptical viewpoint. Is unquestioning belief making a global comeback? The growth of religious fundamentalism seems to suggest so. For the sceptically minded, this is a deeply worrying trend, not just confined to religion. Political, economic, and scientific theories can demand the same unquestioning obedience from the general public. Stuart Sim outlines the history of scepticism in both the Western and Islamic cultural traditions, and from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Setting out what a sceptical politics might be like, Empires of Belief argues that we need less belief and more doubt: an engaged scepticism to replace the pervasive dogmatism that threatens our democracies. Key Features: *New book from the author of the highly successful Fundamentalist World. *Questions belief systems, including science and technology. *Intervenes in current debates around terrorism and fundamentalism. *Explores sceptical thought within different cultural traditions, especially Islam. *Suggests that scepticism can play a greater role in public and political life.
£28.99
Edinburgh University Press The Eighteenth-century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues: An Introduction
This study introduces readers to the eighteenth-century novel through a consideration of contemporary social issues. Eighteenth-century authors grappled with very similar problems to the ones we face today such as: what motivates a fundamentalist terrorist? What are the justifiable limits of state power? What dangers lie in wait for us when we create life artificially? The book discusses key authors from Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century to James Hogg in the 1820s, covering the 'long' eighteenth century. It guides readers through the main genres of the period from Realism, Gothic romance and historical romance to proto-science fiction. It also introduces a range of debates around race relations, anti-social behaviour, family values and born-again theology as well as the power of the media, surveillance, political sovereignty and fundamentalist terrorism. Each novel is shown to be directly relevant to some of the most urgent moral issues of our own time. Key Features *Relates the novels of the eighteenth century to current social and political debates *Accessibly and engagingly written for non-specialists *Covers the key authors and texts of the period including Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Pamela, Northanger Abbey, Tristram Shandy and Frankenstein
£75.00
Icon Books Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide
What might a 'theory of everything' look like? Is science an ideology? Who were Adorno, Horkheimer or the Frankfurt School? The decades since the 1960s have seen an explosion in the production of critical theories. Deconstructionists, poststructuralists, postmodernists, second-wave feminists, new historicists, cultural materialists, postcolonialists, black critics and queer theorists, among a host of others, all vie for our attention. Stuart Sim and Borin Van Loon's incisive graphic guide provides a route through the tangled jungle of competing ideas and provides an essential historical context, situating these theories within tradition of critical analysis going back to the rise of Marxism. They present the essential methods and objectives of each theoretical school in an incisive and accessible manner, and pay special attention to recurrent themes and concerns that have preoccupied a century of critical theoretical activity.
£9.04
Wordsworth Editions Ltd The Pilgrim's Progress
With an Introduction by Professor Stuart Sim. John Bunyan was variously a tinker, soldier, Baptist minister, prisoner and writer of outstanding narrative genius which reached its apotheosis in this, his greatest work. It is an allegory of the Christian life of true brilliance and is presented as a dream which describes the pilgrimage of the hero - Christian - from the City of Destruction via the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Vanity Fair over the River of the Water of Life and into the Celestial City. The Pilgrim's Progress has been translated into 108 languages, was a favourite of Dr Johnson and was praised by Coleridge as one of the few books which might be read repeatedly and each time with a new and different pleasure.
£6.52
