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
Ruth Finnegan FBA is a cultural historian and anthropologist with interdisciplinary interests in classical studies, literature, sociolinguistics, and modes of cognition. She is credited with inspiring a new generation of Africanists to recognize the relevance of oral literature. She is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford and an Emeritus and Research Professor at the Open University UK. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy. She studied classics at Oxford, then social anthropology, fieldwork, and university teaching in Africa. She was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1933.
| 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 |