[Commlist] New open access book: Modern Luck: Narratives of fortune in the long twentieth century (UCL Press)

UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of a new open access 
book that may be of interest to list subscribers: Modern Luck: 
Narratives of fortune in the long twentieth century by Robert S. C. 
Gordon. Download it free: https://bit.ly/3IOkqsW

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Modern Luck
Narratives of fortune in the long twentieth century
Robert S. C. Gordon

Free download: https://bit.ly/3IOkqsW
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Beliefs, superstitions and tales about luck are present across all human 
cultures, according to anthropologists. We are perennially fascinated by 
luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and 
aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips 
and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to 
tame it at different stages in their history, and the modernity of the 
‘long twentieth century’ is no exception to the rule. Apparently 
overshadowed by more conceptually tight, scientific and 
characteristically modern notions such as chance, contingency, 
probability or randomness, luck nevertheless persists in all its 
messiness and vitality, used in our everyday language and the subject of 
studies by everyone from philosophers to psychologists, economists to 
self-help gurus.

Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck’s presence in 
modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern 
imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Indeed, 
it argues that modern luck is constituted through narrative, through 
modern luck stories. Analysing a rich and unusually eclectic range of 
narrative taken from literature, film, music, television and theatre – 
from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, from Pinocchio to Cimino, from Curtiz 
to Kieślowski – it lays out first the usages and meanings of the 
language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns and motifs that 
govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to 
the present day.
 Free download: https://bit.ly/3IOkqsW

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uclpress.co.uk | @uclpress


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