New Titles on New Book Shelf

Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy. They are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This Oxford Handbook takes on the "big questions" about public opinion and the media--both empirical and normative--focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Bringing together the thinking of a team of leading academic experts, its chapters provide a cutting assessment of contemporary research on public opinion, the media, and their interconnections.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities "cultish," revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven's Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of "cultish" everywhere.

This is the first textbook on the linguistic relativity hypothesis, presenting it in user-friendly language, yet analyzing all its premises in systematic ways. The hypothesis claims that there is an intrinsic interconnection between thought, language, and society.

Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it.

What are the Australian Aboriginal languages like? How many are there? Where are they spoken? Are there dictionaries of Aboriginal languages? What kinds of new language have emerged in the last two hundred years? What is the connection between land, people and language in Aboriginal Australia? How does the use of English disadvantage Aboriginal people? This book offers answers these questions by providing a series of studies of aspects of language and culture in different parts of Aboriginal Australia.

How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.

This book is a master class in creative writing that also calls on us to renew our love of storytelling and celebrate the skill of writing well. There is a very good chance that one of your favorite authors learned the craft with Writing Fiction.

While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes--and the literary code of the ultimate professional reader, the college professor.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment is an authoritative guide to the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism. The collection traces the development of ecocriticism from its origins in European pastoral literature and offers fifteen rigorous but accessible essays on the present state of environmental literary scholarship.

Regionalism often evokes provinciality and an affiliation with minor literary genres, but Robert Jackson shows that region is an integral part of American identity, providing grounding for major independent voices. Jackson offers a new critical model of region that contributes to literary and cultural study across a wide range of topics.

Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates addresses two frequently asked questions about narrative studies: "what is narrative theory?" and "how do different approaches to narrative relate to each other?" In engaging with these questions, the book demonstrates the diversity and vitality of the field and promotes a broader dialogue about its assumptions, methods, and purposes.