Tales of the City by Ruth Finnegan
How do we picture urban life and formulate our experience of it? Tales of the City, first published in 1998, brings together the academics' abstract tales with the vivid stories about a particular city, Milton Keynes, and the often moving self-narrations of its residents. It explores the role of story-telling processes for the creative constructing of experience, with particular attention to personal narrations. The story that is now emerging, told by many individual actor narrators, is of the city as a natural setting for human life, in stark contrast to the pessimistic anti-urban tales of many academic narrators. Drawing on narrative studies, cultural and linguistic anthropology and social theory, Professor Finnegan skilfully examines the narrative conventions and cultural implications of our multiple tales of the city, and relates them to profound mythic themes about urban life, community, and to the creative role of the active, reflecting individual.
'Finnegan is an expert in the field of narrative, as she knowledgeably summarises the academic discussion on the categories of story and narrative in a wide range of disciplines …'Anthropos
Finnegan, Ruth: - Ruth Finnegan OBE, FBA, Emeritus Professor Open University. Her work has mainly been on oral performance, narrative, the ethnography of music, and communicating (including extra-sensory perception). Her publications include Oral Literature in Africa, The Hidden Musicians, Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication, Why Do We Quote? and, most recently, the novels Black Inked Pearl, Voyage of Pearl of the Seas, and The Helix Pearl. Born in Ireland, she now lives in Old Bletchley, southern England. Robin Horton, FBA Professor at the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, Nigeria, is an English social anthropologist and philosopher who, in a series of influential works since the 1950s, has challenged and expanded views in the study of religion and anthropology--most notably, his celebrated Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science. He has lived in Africa for four decades where he continues to conduct research on African indigenous religions, magic, mythology, and rituals.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780521626231 |
| ISBN 10 | 0521626234 |
| Title | Tales of the City |
| Author | Ruth Finnegan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 1998-10-08 |
| Number of pages | 228 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |