Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction By William Flesch
2008 | 264 Pages | ISBN: 0674026314 | PDF | 3 MB
With Comeuppance, William Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh. Fiction, Flesch contends, gives us our most powerful way of making sense of the social world. Comeuppance begins with an exploration of the appeal of gossip and ends with an account of how we can think about characters and care about them as much as about persons we know to be real. We praise a storyteller who contrives a happy or at least an appropriate ending, and fault the writer who refuses us one. Flesch uses Darwinian theory to show how fiction satisfies our desire to see the good vindicated and the wicked get their comeuppance. He conveys the danger and excitement of reading fiction with nimble intelligence and provides wide reference to stories both familiar and little known. Flesch has given us a book that is sure to claim a central place in the discussion of literature and the humanities.

Costly Calculations: A Theory of War, Casualties, and Politics
English | 2021 | ISBN: 1107075289 | 394 Pages | PDF | 11 MB
Gartner and Segura consider the costs of war - both human and political - by examining the consequences of foreign combat, on domestic politics. The personal costs of war - the military war dead and injured - are the most salient measure of war costs generally and the primary instrument through which war affects domestic politics. The authors posit a general framework for understanding war initiation, war policy and war termination in democratic polities, and the role that citizens and their deaths through conflict play in those policy choices. Employing a variety of empirical methods, they examine multiple wars from the last 100 years, conducting analyses of tens of thousands of individuals across a wide variety of historical and hypothetical conditions, whilst also addressing policy implications. This study will be of interest to students and scholars in American foreign policy, international politics, public opinion, national security, American politics, communication studies, and military history.

Comeuppance - Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction
pdf | 2.19 MB | English | Isbn:‎ B0957Z6VY6 | Author: Flesch, William | Year: 2009