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result(s) for
"Generosity Fiction."
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The giving tree
A young boy grows to manhood and old age experiencing the love and generosity of a tree which gives to him without thought of return.
Book
Hwæt!: adaptive benefits of public displays of generosity and bravery in Beowulf
Costly signalling - along with other adaptive mechanisms, including reciprocity and kin selection - supports altruism in human societies. Because literary works can reflect the lives, motivations and ideals of real cultures, the same adaptive forces governing the actions of actual persons may drive the interactions depicted in these stories. Based on this reasoning, we analysed the interactions in the Old-English poem Beowulf, asking whether the beneficent behaviour exhibited by the characters functions as costly signalling or as exchange-based interactions. We found that both mechanisms play a role but costly signalling provides benefits beyond those from relationships based on exchange. Specifically, gift exchange promoted comrade allegiance but costly signalling additionally provided status increase to the signaller. Furthermore, boasting about oneself forged alliances whereas telling tales about the exploits of others increased speaker status. We show that hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory can be explored through quantitative text analyses of period-specific literature.
Journal Article
Star time
Gina wants more than anything to be the star of the show that her class will perform, but everything seems to go wrong until she makes a generous choice.
BOOK
From gift to commodity : capitalism and sacrifice in nineteenth-century American fiction
Fascinating analysis of the significance of the gift, and its increasingly complicated role in an emerging capitalist order, in nineteenth-century American fiction
In this rich interdisciplinary study, Hildegard Hoeller argues that nineteenth-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period’s fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture.
eBook
Enough to go around : a story of generosity
When Kevin learns that not everyone has enough to eat, like the full meals he enjoys with his family every night, he organizes a food drive at school.
Book
Greed, Generosity, and other Problems with Unmarried Women's Property
This essay examines how blood ties motivate the financial choices of several unmarried women in Anthony Trollope's fiction. It both proposes a model for interpreting female economic agency that does not depend primarily upon sexual economies and suggests the significance of married women's property reform for relationships outside of marriage. The punitive plotlines I examine inThe Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, andCan You Forgive Her?highlight the similar threats posed by single women's greed and generosity. By challenging principles of inheritance and heterosexual exchange, depriving the very families they claim to help of support, and creating unacceptable burdens for their male kin, these characters underscore contemporary fears and fantasies about the intrafamilial stakes of women's independent financial choices.
Journal Article
Harold loves his woolly hat
Harold's a very special bear who always wears a woolly hat, so when a crow steals the hat from him, he tries to win it back.
Book
The plum in the golden vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, volume four
This is the fourth and penultimate volume in David Roy's celebrated translation of one of the most famous and important novels in Chinese literature.The Plum in the Golden Vaseor,Chin P'ing Meiis an anonymous sixteenth-century work that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ch'ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. The novel, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of the narrative art form--not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context.
Written during the second half of the sixteenth century and first published in 1618, ThePlum in the Golden Vaseis noted for its surprisingly modern technique. With the possible exception ofThe Tale of Genji(ca. 1010) andDon Quixote(1605, 1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. Although its importance in the history of Chinese narrative has long been recognized, the technical virtuosity of the author, which is more reminiscent of the Dickens ofBleak House, the Joyce ofUlysses, or the Nabokov ofLolitathan anything in earlier Chinese fiction, has not yet received adequate recognition. This is partly because all of the existing European translations are either abridged or based on an inferior recension of the text. This complete and annotated translation aims to faithfully represent and elucidate all the rhetorical features of the original in its most authentic form and thereby enable the Western reader to appreciate this Chinese masterpiece at its true worth.
eBook
Those shoes
Jeremy, who longs to have the black high tops that everyone at school seems to have but his grandmother cannot afford, is excited when he sees them for sale in a thrift shop and decides to buy them even though they're the wrong size.
Book
Fact or fiction? Welfare cuts and fiscal adjustments
Governments in the industrialised western democracies have repeatedly been advised to curb the welfare state when adjusting public finances in order to stabilise public debt in the long run and to create economic growth. This recommendation has been founded on a vast body of research on fiscal adjustments, which has come to the conclusion that cutting social expenditures leads to expansionary and more sustainable budget consolidations. This paper adds to the existing literature suggesting a more nuanced view, which challenges the simplicity of the “cutting-welfare” advice: first, we find that whereas less social spending is indeed associated with expansionary and successful adjustments, this is not the case for overall welfare state generosity. Second, disaggregating the welfare state in its components reveals that a reduction of pension generosity is indeed related to successful adjustments whereas reducing unemployment generosity does not seem to play a major role.
Journal Article