Examining a variety of texts ranging from the Ancient Near East to the nineteenth century, this book deals with the inevitable presence of both fact and fiction in historical thought and investigates when, where and to what degree they were distinguished.

Describes authors, works, and literary terms from all eras and all parts of the world.

Brian Chan's poetry goes beyond everyday appearance to the inner space where the consciousness "begins to question the power of space it has fictioned". In staring into the abyss over which such fictions are spun, Fabula Rasa challenges all comfortable and solid assumptions. Thus, those poems which affirm the power of love or celebrate those moments 'brimming with light', seem both more powerful and more movingly vulnerable in their act of affirmation. Chan's poetry requires close attention but has a pellucid quality: "Plumbing my darkest heart, I shape the glass/ of plain mind in which you may taste your own". Brian Chan grew up in Guyana. He is an accomplished musician and painter, and now lives in Edmonton, Canada.

A historical novel set when ancient Rome was under the siege of the barbarian Visigoths, who had arrived from the far north. It is based on a true story: one woman was at the center of it allintelligent and very beautiful among a thousand other qualitiesPlacidia, sister of the emperor Honorio, becomes very important for Rome. In the great looting suffered by Rome, this Roman woman is carried off by barbarians, and love develops between Galla Placidia and a barbarian, the brother of the king of the Visigoths. Adventure, love, warthis novel contains them all. This romance became an epic love story; only death could separate the two lovers. When her lover is killed by another barbarian, Galla Placidiadaughter of an emperor, sister of an emperor, and mother of an emperoris left with the task of continuing the story of Rome.

Narrative Intelligence (NI) — the confluence of narrative, Artificial Intelligence, and media studies — studies, models, and supports the human use of narrative to understand the world. This volume brings together established work and founding documents in Narrative Intelligence to form a common reference point for NI researchers, providing perspectives from computational linguistics, agent research, psychology, ethology, art, and media theory. It describes artificial agents with narratively structured behavior, agents that take part in stories and tours, systems that automatically generate stories, dramas, and documentaries, and systems that support people telling their own stories. It looks at how people use stories, the features of narrative that play a role in how people understand the world, and how human narrative ability may have evolved. It addresses meta-issues in NI: the history of the field, the stories AI researchers tell about their research, and the effects those stories have on the things they discover. (Series B)

The Concept of History reflects on the presuppositions behind the contemporary understanding of history that often remain implicit and not spelled out. It is a critique of the modern understanding of history that presents it as universal and teleological, progressively moving forward to an end. Although few contemporary philosophers and historians maintain the view that there is strict universality and teleology in history, the remnants of these positions still affect our understanding of history. But if history is not universal and singular, evolving toward an objective universal end, it should be possible to admit of multiple histories, some of which we appropriate as our own. An another important aspect of this book is that if provides an account of history that is itself both historical and rooted in attempts to narrate and explain history from its inception in antiquity. The book seeks to establish features or constituents of history that might be found in any historical account and might themselves be considered historical invariants in history.