Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a century's received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies this book is completely severed from Christianity. Instead, it is influenced in particular by the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche, both of whom insisted that a genuine morality was actually incompatible with Christianity. The sequence of chapters moves from addictions on the streets, into rehab clinics, and finally into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the first book to argue that the search for pleasure drives alcoholism and drug addiction and not the "numbing of pain". Throughout the book I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied by the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, and further argue that they do not have the authority to tell hundreds of millions of Americans that addiction is not a moral failing. I also query throughout the book the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addictions to alcohol and drugs are attributable to causes that their specific disciplines are best suited to understand. I argue that there is nothing complex about addiction: it is a simple behavioural disorder. The language routinely employed to discuss addiction is similarly not complex, just confused, and so it is also the rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism, that this book evaluates.

This new edition of Kevin McCarron's study includes a new chapter on Golding's posthumous book The Double Tongue, and so encompasses the whole of Golding's novels. This is a comprehensive study, questioning Lord of the Flies' status as Golding's most popular and important work and giving prominence to The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, The Spire and The Sea Trilogy. McCarron takes an interdisciplinary approach, placing particular emphasis on the anthropological perspective missing from most critical texts on Golding's writings. He also considers Golding's work from the perspective of a number of critical approaches, including the postcolonial discourse, offering readers an alternative to the standard liberal humanist approach. An in-depth evaluation of Golding's essays and travel journal provides new insight in the work of one of the 20th-century's greatest writers.

Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a century's received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies this book is completely severed from Christianity. Instead, it is influenced in particular by the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche, both of whom insisted that a genuine morality was actually incompatible with Christianity. The sequence of chapters moves from addictions on the streets, into rehab clinics, and finally into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the first book to argue that the search for pleasure drives alcoholism and drug addiction and not the "numbing of pain". Throughout the book I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied by the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, and further argue that they do not have the authority to tell hundreds of millions of Americans that addiction is not a moral failing. I also query throughout the book the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addictions to alcohol and drugs are attributable to causes that their specific disciplines are best suited to understand. I argue that there is nothing complex about addiction: it is a simple behavioural disorder. The language routinely employed to discuss addiction is similarly not complex, just confused, and so it is also the rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism, that this book evaluates.

Edited by Morag Styles and written by an international team of acknowledged experts, this series provides jargon-fee, critical discussion and a comprehensive guide to literary and popular texts for children. Each book introduces the reader to a major genre if children's literature, covering the key authors, major works and contexts in which those texts are published, read and studied. The development of the horror genre in children's literature has been a startling phenomenon - one that has provoked strong, but mixed, reactions. Frightening Fiction provides a lucid and lively guide to that genre, ranging from analyses of such popular series as Point Horror, Goosebumps, the X Files and the buffy stories, to the work of individual authors such as Robert Westall, David Almond, Philip Gross and Lesley Howarth. Kimberly Reynolds is Professor of Children's Literature at the University of Surrey Roehampton and Director of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature where Kevin McCarron is Senior Lecturer in American Literature. Geraldine Brennan is Books Editor for the Times Educational Supplement.