A literary master’s entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasureWhat makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. How to Read Literature

A trenchant analysis of sacrifice as the foundation of the modern, as well as the ancient, social orderThe modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic abnegation. But even in the Old Testament, the dual natures of sacrifice, embodying both ritual slaughter and moral rectitude, were at odds. In this analysis, Terry Eagleton makes a compelling argument that the idea of sacri...

In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing new light on these and other questions he has raised in previous best-sellers, Eagleton offers a new theory of what we mean by literature. He also shows what it is that a great ...

Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest—a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works, including symbols, themes, and contexts—teaches you how to make your everyday reading experience richer and more rewarding.While books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings beneath the surfac...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author's revelatory celebration of the novel - at once an anatomy of the art of fiction, a guide for readers and writers and a memoir of literary life.Over her 20 year career, Jane Smiley has written many kinds of novels - mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. But when her impulse to write faltered after 9/11, she decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read 100 of them, from the 1000-year-old Tale of Genji to the recent...

Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, 'Elements of Fiction', John Mullan examines novels mostly of the last ten years, many of which have become firm favourites with reading groups. He reveals the rich resources of novelistic technique, settingrecent f...

**A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader.“A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images.” —The New York Times**What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collec...

Why do we read literature and how do we judge it? C. S. Lewis's classic An Experiment in Criticism springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He argues that "good reading," like moral action or religious experience, involves surrender to the work in hand and a process of entering fully into the opinions of others: "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain...

This groundbreaking study of the work and legacy of Virginia Woolf is also an account of the intertwined lives of two extraordinary women.In 1932, Ruth Gruber earned her PhD—the youngest person ever to do so—with a stunning doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Published in 1935, the paper was the first-ever feminist critique of Woolf's work and inspired a series of correspondences between the two writers. It also led to Gruber's eventual meeting with Woolf, whi...

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: 'How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and the contemporary world?'As well as being a selection from the poet's three previous collections of prose ( Preoccupations

Wayne Booth transformed the study of fiction in the twentieth century and wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time. In What Every Novelist Needs to Know about Narrators, Booth tackles one of the most difficult issues writers of fiction face: the choice of which narrative approach to take in their work. With trademark Booth aplomb, he articulates the methods behind dramatization, character development, and point of view that are indispensable for succes...

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography,...