Drawing on educational materials, textbooks, adventure tales, plays, and Sunday-school papers, Boys and Girls in No Man's Land explores the role of children in the nation's war effort.

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

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"Abbott offers a fruitful new way to read science fiction, one that also greatly enriches our understanding of western history and its impact on our collective imagination. Detailing the overlap of science fiction and western fiction - especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism - he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps." "Reviewing the work of many Hugo and Nebula Award winners, as well as drawing upon popular film and television series (like the Buck Rogers serials), Abbott's study journeys across the far reaches of science fiction's universe."

In this final volume of the trilogy on the theme of adventure begun with The Robinson Crusoe Story and Seven Types of Adventure Tale, Martin Green argues that Western civilization and culture have been inspired and characterized by the idea of adventure as much as by more famous ideas like democracy and justice. Green explores the dimensions of both individual and group or political forms of adventure, uncovering the presence of the adventure idea, and tracing its influence, in various kinds of cultural activity and ideology, from exploration, sports, and nationalistic activity to philosophy, politics, science, and economics. In most cases, he finds a cult of energy, risk, and heroism that answers to the excitement of those stories defined as adventures. Moreover, he demonstrates that the cult is linked to masculinity and certain virtues associated with men rather than women. The Adventurous Male will augment ongoing discussion and debate in the realms of both feminism and the men's movement.