New Releases by Peter Boxall

The Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as ''The Idea of Beauty'', the nature of ''Mere Being'', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself - those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.

Strategy and Human Resource Management is concerned with examining how HR strategy impacts on an organisation''s chances of survival and its relative success, and with understanding how it varies across important organisational, industry and societal contexts. It takes an analytical approach, which examines and explains what managers do and why they do it before offering any sort of prescription for what the authors think they should do. This approach is grounded in research but is brought to life with examples, cases and vignettes to offer a practice-orientated analysis of the subject. As well as explaining important general principles in strategic HRM, critical features of the different contexts in which they are applied are examined. For this fifth edition, there is increased coverage of contemporary topics, including capital markets and increasing financialisation, Industry 4.0, the shaping of employee voice under different varieties of capitalism and the effects of austerity. Strategy and Human Resource Management retains, however, the classic sources that are fundamental to the subject while also including important theoretical advances and the best new studies of strategies in the world of work and people.

This study tests the argument that human resource management in hotels enhances service-recovery performance and job satisfaction through empowering front-line employees to respond to service failures. After an initial phase of qualitative interviewing, dyadic data were gathered through a large-scale survey in thirty hotels in Sri Lanka. The results of structural equation modelling show that the HR practices and management styles adopted in this context help to develop job competence, which is then related to service-recovery performance and job satisfaction. However, they show that service recovery is carefully stage-managed and ''staircased'' in this hotel context with empowerment strongly related to hierarchical level. Empowerment to address service failures is important in these hotels but it is deliberately graduated according to rank. While employee training shows benefits for both parties, greater job autonomy would enhance the well-being of these service workers. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2019.03.006.

Approximately 30 years since my paper with Peter Dowling on ''Human Resource Management and the Industrial Relations Tradition'' was published in Labour and Industry, this paper reflects on how the academic literature on Human Resource Management (HRM), particularly strategic HRM, has developed. Starting with a reprise of the claims in the original article, it offers an overview of the state of the field and concludes that there is a mixed report card for the last 30 years. There is clearly a need to more carefully theorise the economic motives of the firm and to understand the history and variety of employer behaviour in its diverse context. Hard work continues to be required in integrating theories from different disciplines and academics need to be open to research methods beyond their own personal preference. However, strategic HRM has become a more balanced subject, which embraces both sides of the employment relationship: employee well-being and organisational performance. While improving the rigour of our research methods is going to be important in the next 30 years, research in strategic HRM should also focus on making a better contribution to societal debates about the opportunities and problems of employment relations. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1080/10301763.2018.1427423.

Using a two-wave survey of 315 workers in a lean manufacturing plant, this study examines how work intensification affects employee wellbeing and how its effects may be ameliorated. It demonstrates that work intensification is transmitted into poorer wellbeing through greater emotional exhaustion. It shows that this mediation process is moderated by line-manager support, which buffers the relationship between emotional exhaustion and wellbeing. The study suggests that the health-impairing risks of high work intensity in lean settings can be reduced through better supervisory support. Ensuring that line managers have the opportunity, skills and motivation to offer good support to workers is a vital aspect of the interventions needed to counteract the health risks posed by lean production. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X19890678.

Drawing on the job demands-resources and effort-reward imbalance models, this study investigates the mediating roles of intrinsic motivation and distributive justice in the relationships between line-manager support and employee wellbeing (job satisfaction, work engagement and physical health). Responses to a survey of 357 front-line workers in a Chinese manufacturer were analysed through structural equation modelling. We find, in this context, that line managers are a strong determinant of employee wellbeing when they foster the intrinsic motivation of employees and their perceptions of organisational justice. Such findings are helpful for our understanding of attitudes in the Chinese workforce and underline the value of analysing multiple mediating mechanisms and multiple wellbeing outcomes in human resource management-wellbeing research. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2017.1423103.

PurposeGrounded in the theory of person-organisation fit, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which instrumental work values influence the relationship between HR practices and employee well-being (measured by job satisfaction) in a sample of Chinese workers.Design/methodology/approachQuestionnaire data for this cross-sectional, quantitative study were collected from 371 front-line workers in a Chinese manufacturer. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.FindingsThe results show that work instrumentalism significantly reduces the positive effect of training on job satisfaction while boosting the positive effect of remuneration on job satisfaction. In contrast, there is no evidence for an interaction between instrumentalism and employee involvement.Practical implicationsThe results imply that the degree to which HR practices are effective in promoting job satisfaction among these Chinese workers depends both on their work-value orientations and on the implications of the particular HR practice. Managers concerned about job satisfaction in China need to consider the impact of work values and the goals of particular HR practices.Originality/valueChina makes an enormously important contribution to world manufacturing output but the authors need a better understanding of how Chinese workers are likely to interpret and respond to HR practices if employee well-being in Chinese enterprises is to be fostered.Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-01-2017-0015.

The high-involvement model of human resource management (HRM) is seen as offering major benefits to organisations, employees and societies through enhancing employee motivation, enabling people to reach more of their potential, and producing better quality and innovation. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that we can stimulate more of it by simply ''turning up the volume'' on its virtues. In this article, we highlight what we have learnt about the model, including the contextual factors that enable and constrain its uptake. We also discuss the tensions that affect the quality and sustainability of particular implementations. These include the need to retain employee commitment when it is threatened by all-too-common periods of restructuring, the need to manage the relationship between greater involvement and work intensification, and the need to ensure a good match between the kinds of autonomy that employees value and the working arrangements that organisations need in complex, interdependent teamwork.

High-involvement models of working are associated with high levels of worker influence over the work process, identified through worker perceptions of their jobs and working environment. This article reviews what is known about the conditions that foster the adoption of such models. Drawing on studies of worker participation in management since the 1950s, the article seeks to understand what explains the dispersion of high-involvement work processes in the private sector. In terms of understanding the potential for worker involvement in decision-making, the article argues that it is important to analyse the way in which managers develop production systems in firms. A range of conditions in manufacturing and in services are then discussed. While economic incentives are critical, the ongoing existence of societal differences, including a pronounced ''Nordic effect'', suggests that economically unattractive environments do not necessarily lack opportunities to enhance worker well-being through greater involvement. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X15599584.

This article uses national-level data to examine the benefits for workers of better skill utilisation and the question of how opportunities to use skills in the workplace can be enhanced. Analysis of the New Zealand data in the 2005 and 2015 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme confirms that better skill utilisation is generally associated with a broad range of beneficial outcomes, including higher employee income, better opportunities for career advancement, higher job satisfaction, greater organisational commitment and lower turnover intentions. In addition, skill utilisation serves as a significant mediator between work autonomy and employee outcomes, particularly in the 2015 survey. As a general rule, better utilisation of employee skills will occur in organisational climates in which employee autonomy is encouraged. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0022185618819169.

PurposeThis study aims to explore the implementation of data analytics in the Big-Four accounting firms, including the extent to which a digital transformation is changing the work of financial auditors, why it is doing so and how these firms are managing the transformation process.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted 23 interviews with 20 participants across four hierarchical levels from three of the Big-Four accounting firms in New Zealand.FindingsThe firms have entered the era of “smart audit systems”, in which auditors provide deep business insights that are communicated more effectively through data visualisation. The full potential, however, of data analytics depends not only on the transformation process within accounting firms but also on improvement in the quality of IT systems in client companies. The appointment of transformation managers, the recruitment of technology-savvy graduates and the provision of extensive training are helping to embed data analytics in the Big-Four firms. Accounting graduates in financial audit now need to show that they have the aptitude to become “citizen data scientists”.Practical implicationsThe findings explain how data analytics is being embraced in the Big-Four auditing firms and underline the implications for those who work in them.Originality/valueThe findings challenge the “technological reluctance” thesis. In contrast, the authors observe a climate of positive attitudes towards new technology and accompanying actions in the Big-Four firms. The authors show how branches of the Big-Four firms operating distantly from their global headquarters, and with smaller economies of scale, are implementing the new technologies that characterise their global firms.Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1108/PAR-06-2021-0105.

This study examines two sources of workplace learning (via supervisors and via colleagues) as potential mediators accounting for the effects of social support and training on employee wellbeing. Analysis of survey data from 279 Chinese workers reveals that they react to the two sources of learning differently, possibly as a consequence of a high-power-distance culture. Learning from supervisors is the only significant mediator in the relationships between social support and training, on the one hand, and employee wellbeing (physical health, work engagement and job satisfaction), on the other. This demonstrates that different forms of workplace learning can have different antecedents and consequences, and suggests that the supervisor-employee dyad is particularly important for work-related learning in China. The study shows that a learning-based mediation process contributes to job-resources-to-wellbeing relationships, and should be factored into future theorization in the job demands-resources (JD-R).

Situated within a societal perspective on human resource management (HRM), this paper asks how HRM academics can make a better contribution to understanding the impacts of HRM on societal well-being. It argues that we should target the ''so what?'' questions that matter to society, including important issues of employer-employee misalignment and of perverse alignment (''perverse-performance work systems''). It calls for an approach to societal issues in HRM that is problem-focused and theory-informed. While recognising some validity to the criticisms of academic HRM raised in the ''psychologisation'' debate, the article argues that the critique is over-generalised and contests the idea that the concern of HRM academics with enhancing workplace mutuality is an expression of a unitarist ideology. Mutuality and unitarism should not be conflated. In advancing a pluralist agenda, it argues that we must become better at theoretical integration, at synergising our research methods and at engaging constructively with practitioners and policy makers.

This study is concerned with the debate around employee well-being in the environment of lean production. It applies the job demands-resources model to examine the effects of problem-solving demands and job resources (training, participation in decision-making, and line manager support) on employee engagement and exhaustion in a Chinese manufacturer. It examines previously untested interactions and shows that these job resources created a “buffering effect” in the relationship between problem-solving demands and exhaustion. It also shows a “coping effect” because the relationship between resources and engagement was strengthened as problem-solving demands increased. Rather than being uniformly positive or negative, the results suggest that the overall impact of lean production on worker well-being is likely to depend on the ways in which managers create scope for worker involvement in decision-making, target resources to the specific job demands, and adjust resource levels to the degree of these demands. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12204.

This study interrogates the Work Orientation module of the International Social Survey Pro-gramme (ISSP) across three waves (1997, 2005 and 2015) to understand the job values of New Zealanders. It finds that men and women are more similar than different in their job values, that full-timers are more concerned with income and career prospects than part-timers, and that higher education tends to raise expectations of having an interesting job and a high level of pay. New Zealanders have become somewhat more altruistic at work, confirming the image of the ''helpful Kiwi'', but their job values have not shifted much across these surveys and are similar to those of employees in other developed countries. The broad pattern is that a vital extrinsic factor, job security, and the intrinsic quality of work out-rank the value of the extrinsic factors of high income and career prospects for New Zealanders.

Many authors have advocated a human-centric view of Industrie 4.0 automation, in which the human operator works with augmented powers and capabilities such as super-strength, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, although their roles are still in the manufacture of the product. A human-automation symbiosis in the production process, with robotic and IOT tools helping to extend and meld the capabilities of the Operator to accomplish the tasks of production is a proposed goal. The approach taken in the present work does not, however, envisage a super-human outcome. Rather, the goal is the unleashing of human creative potential, as a complement to the robotic and virtual world of the automated production system.Agile manufacturers typically run small scale operations (20 people or less), make short runs of many products and are continuously involved in their design - both at detailed and conceptual levels. This can be a strength in terms of international competitiveness where knowledge of the production process, the product end user needs, and the machinery and tooling itself combine to produce innovation. SME manufacturers are actually designers. Their employees think about design as they manufacture. We foresee that the Operator may transition to a Maker - a person who works alongside the automated production system but with a different role - one which is essentially creative, rather than assisting or monitoring non-discretionary work flow steps or processes.For full paper go to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360835218305278.

In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More''s Utopia to Margaret Atwood''s Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

The measurement of passive use values has become an important issue in environmental economics. In this paper we examine an extension or variant of contingent valuation, the choice experiment, which employs a series of questions with more than two alternatives that are designed to elicit responses that allow the estimation of preferences over attributes of an environmental state. We also combine the information from choice experiments and contingent valuation to test for differences in preferences and error variances arising from the two methods. Our results show that choice experiments have considerable merit in measuring passive use values.

Water management can generate valuable ecosystem services but can be costly to implement. We examine this issue using irrigation water storage infrastructure which has the potential to provide desirable services to residential properties affected by the condition of the storage structure. We examine a particular prairie setting where concerns regarding fluctuations in water levels of an irrigation storage lake led to an agreement between the irrigation agency and the owners of properties around the lake to stabilize water levels. Using quasi-experimental hedonic property approaches with two different control groups we estimate the subsequent impact of this agreement on shoreline property values using a time series of sales data. The methods utilized in this article represent an effective approach to produce plausible estimates of some of the economic values captured by the infrastructure generating ecosystem services. We find that property values increased as a result of the agreement and that the additional property tax revenues arising from these values can be used to some extent to offset the annual service fees paid to the irrigation agency to provide the stabilized lake levels. This article illustrates the potential for irrigation infrastructure management to provide increases in ecosystem service values beyond irrigation, and also that these values can be captured to pay for the costs of providing these increased values.

We extend count data travel cost modeling by developing a utility theoretic system of semilogarithmic recreation demand equations. The restrictions required to make the system utility theoretic are applied during estimation. The model is applied to individual wilderness recreation trips in a system of four Canadian wilderness parks. The resulting demand system is used to examine the impacts of changing U.S.-Canadian currency exchange rates on participation and welfare of U.S. recreationists.

An adult mystery yarn...Stephanie Howe is out of prison after a ten stretch for GBH and more, enjoying a celebratory drink at the local hostelry for dodgy guys and gals, The Bootmakers Arms, a.k.a. The Cobblers. The notorious lady gangster has business to clear up from before her holiday at her Majesty''s request.Much has changed in her leafy suburb, north east of London, during the interruption in her life. The pub has new owners; guys who have made their millions in The City of London. Managed by the mercurial Veronica, a mystery herself. A landlady who has calmed the pub from being a scene from the Wild West to simply a den of thieves. They are desperate to redevelop the pub and shed it of its sleazy image. Next door to the pub the once defunct and discredited Prep School, now the magnificent Blue Skies House Retirement Home. Owned by Benny ''BJ'' Johnson, a larger than life character of Nigerian origin with an overdraft to match his ego.There is a relatively new Detective Inspector on the block, Mike Griffin. He has a long-term case to solve. The disappearance of sixteen gold bars after a raid on a Spanish Bank in The City of London a decade earlier. Word is that it is in his patch and he has been deployed to solve this, together with an unhealthy spike in crime figures in the area.An area where many know plenty but divulge little. Dodgy pasts are more than the norm. Who really knows what though? Fake news and misinformation are D.I. Griffin''s bug bear. An intriguing pool of characters for him and his tenacious team of two to unravel. One of the pub''s most frequent visitors is a peddler of goods illegally acquired in London''s West End, who certainly, doesn''t stand out as being anything other than a punter; but has he a secret to be told? Cobblers is an entertaining, page turning, adult mystery yarn that looks at everyday life of everyday folk in a not necessarily normal society. Much illicit shagging seems to be excepted, or even expected. With the local Constabulary more than contributing to the shenanigans, as well as appearing to carry a stash of nine-bob notes. Or is this more reality than the lives many of us lead?The gold though? The tale attempts to untangle the mystery whereabouts of the bullion.Character and dialogue driven, explosive at times, with many a twist, Cobblers will absorb you into a world that we all live very close to.Prepare to be entertained and if you can second guess the outcome you are one ahead of the author.

This multi-level study analyses the ''black box'' of HRM in an Australian cinema chain, a standardized service environment. Management''s espoused goals for the casual workers who run the cinema service include attempts to build customer-oriented behaviour, both directly and via empowerment, and also efforts to ensure compliance with company policies and to enhance employee commitment. Our analysis of an employee survey and supervisory performance ratings shows that it is behavioural compliance that is positively associated with rated performance rather than customer-oriented behaviour. While customer service is an important value, it is willing engagement with a highly scripted, efficiency-oriented work process that makes it happen, not a more empowering form of work design. On the other hand, the management process also fosters a level of employee commitment, which has some value in a tight labour market. The study demonstrates the way in which actual models of HRM can contain a complex and ''contradictory'' set of messages, consistent with critical accounts of the labour process and suggesting that notions of ''internal fit'' need to recognize such tensions. It underlines the importance of identifying the multiple goals in management''s espoused theories of HRM and then assessing their links via managerial behaviour and employee responses to performance outcomes.

This volume offers the fullest and most nuanced account available of the last eight decades of British prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel and the reader. The collection is made up of thirty-four chapters by leading scholars in the field who detail the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender and different periods of women''s writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children''s novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.

As a 56 years old male living in the suburbs of London, sport has played a major part in my life. Life in the Medium Paced Lane tracks 40 years of performing at the highest level (achieveable). Like limbo, the bar gets lower as time moves on. This is a memoir that will excite most of the population (okay slightly ambitious). It takes in the sixties (just) through to the noughties. It encompasses a sporting life that has rubbed shoulders with the good, great and the ugly. From the playing fields of Essex to international encounters on the other side of the world. Catching a cricket ball from a superstar to plucking an egg out of the midnight sky. The grandeur of Lord''s to a burning sofa on a wicket in South Essex. Hopefully as humorous as it is true. A page turning read that leaves you just wondering...well just wondering - Enjoy!

Peter Boxall''s The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the ethical, political and literary value of the novel as a genre at turning point in the history both of literature and of criticism. As the dominant critical concerns of the twentieth century faded, and new cultural and technological environments emerged, Boxall argues that we lost our collective sense of the purpose of the novel. This book responds to this predicament by demonstrating why and how the novel matters to us today. Ranging from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith, Boxall shows how the formal properties of the novel allow us to imagine the worlds in which we live. This is a vibrant, compelling and richly informed critical perspective that asks us to see anew how central fiction is to our idea of the world, and how richly the novel informs our attempts to understand our present and our future.

J Curve is a humorous contemporary tale of how a high flyer in business allows greed to become his main motivation and potentially his downfall. The story opens in October 2014 in the City of London. Brett Hunter, the supposedly suave and sophisticated, Managing Director of Sobbolds Leisure; brewery owners, with an extensive portfolio of hotels, pubs, restaurants and much more, is about to embark on his biggest deal to date. The takeover of Gulbey- Barrett''s, the sleeping drinks conglomerate giant. Hunter believes that he is nearing the pinnacle of his career, with the social trappings associated with this. His parallel life though is driven by greed. In the weeks that follow Hunter''s world begins to disintegrate, but he hasn''t got to where he is without the ability to fight his corner. Max Shadpole though, the Executive Editor of The Sunday Post, a national tabloid newspaper has been on his case for a long time and whilst Hunter is distracted by the impending business deal, Max edges towards exposing the real Hunter. Throughout J Curve looks at the characters and their lives; magnifying warts and all of those involved in the impending City takeover. The glamorous, high flying bankers, Jayne Russell and Jane Morgan play prominent roles and their contrasting characters are illuminated as the story progresses. The Directors at Gulbey''s, in particular the upstanding Edward Goodyear and the eccentric Guy Gulbey, prove that tragedy and day to day humour are both fundamental to everyday life. Threaded throughout the story is how life at the top can be very lonely. J Curve avoids the technicalities of business, concentrating on how life spins in many directions for all those involved, moving at a fast pace, culminating in many revelations and an unexpected twist of fate.

This paper examines the impact of oil and gas facilities on rural residential property values using data from Central Alberta, Canada. The influences are evaluated using two groups of variables characterizing hazard effects and amenity effects. A spatial error model was employed to capture the spatial dependence between neighbouring properties. The results show that property values are negatively correlated with the number of sour gas wells and flaring oil batteries within 4 km of the property. Indices reflecting health hazards associated with potential rates of H2S release (based on information from Emergency Response Plans and Zones) also have a significant negative association with property prices. The findings suggest that oil and sour gas facilities located within 4 km of rural residential properties significantly affect their sale price.

Among the measures taken by the Australian government to address one of the worst droughts on record in the Murray-Darling Basin, exit package issues have rarely been investigated. A stated preference survey was designed to identify the range of water prices required for irrigators to sell all their water entitlements and leave the irrigation industry. Farmer participation responses are generally price elastic. There are large regional differences in price elasticities, but within a region there are few differences based on subgroups of farmers.

If Trollope, Cooper and Christie could ever have collaborated on a novel they would probably come up with something very similar to ''Stumped Identity''. Rory Embers, a teenager in long term foster care along with his four younger siblings in urban North London, wants to find his real father and seeks retribution for the life he has given them. To find his father he gains the help of Sophie Anderson, a young Social worker who, unbeknown to Rory, has an agenda of her own. Their investigations lead them to the seemingly idyllic West Country village, Craig Dell, where the cricket club is the hub of the village. Here in the heart of middle England, villagers go about their business and pleasure. Behind the net curtains all is not quite so straight forward and an unconventional lifestyle and seedy underbelly is slowly uncovered. But which of the residents is Rory''s father? Two fit the bill precisely; Phil ''Popeye'' Embers, the village butcher and Miles Harrington, the recently arrived, secretive peddler of pornography. Not until the final pages is the ''who done it'' revealed. ''Stumped Identity'' is a fast paced yarn that has humour threaded throughout whilst addressing a serious social issue.

"The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today''s literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century"-- Provided by publisher.