The look of love . . . through an analytic lensLong treated with skepticism in literary and cultural studies, love – as a subject of serious scholarly inquiry – is now attracting intense interest and renewed attention. Love, Etc. centers on two key themes: representations of love in literature and culture and love as a relationship to literature and culture. How are our attitudes to love changing in the wake of new technologies and social media; shifting n...

A book on the experience of reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels. What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. She owned John Plotz at age eight, on the overlit and understaffed second floor of the DC library. Four decades and who knows how many re-readings later, her Earthsea owns him still. The reasons to love her Earthsea are many. Le Guin sets readers adrift among worlds: peripatetic but somehow at home. She sub...

There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe.What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else...

There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe.What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else...

Since 2012, Public Books has championed a new kind of community for intellectual engagement, discussion, and action. An online magazine that unites the best of the university with the openness of the internet, Public Books is where new ideas are debuted, old facts revived, and dangerous illusions dismantled. Here, young scholars present fresh thinking to audiences outside the academy, accomplished authors weigh in on timely issues, and a wide range of readers encounter th...

A prolific artist, writer, designer, and political activist, William Morris remains remarkably powerful and relevant today. But how do you teach someone like Morris who made significant contributions to several different fields of study? And how, within the exigencies of the modern educational system, can teachers capture the interdisciplinary spirit of Morris, whose various contributions hang so curiously together? Teaching William Morris gathers together the work of nineteen Morris schol...

When you are half lost in a work of art, what happens to the half left behind? Semi-Detached delves into this state of being: what it means to be within and without our social and physical milieu, at once interacting and drifting away, and how it affects our ideas about aesthetics. The allure of many modern aesthetic experiences, this book argues, is that artworks trigger and provide ways to make sense of this oscillating, in-between place. John Plotz focuses on Victorian and earl...

Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel’s existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation.This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations—with a focus ...

What kind of adventure begins in the living room on a rainy Monday afternoon? It depends. Say you just found out that Granny, who raised you, is going to lose her house because there's nothing valuable left to sell except an unfinished tapestry. And say that your pet blackbird Mead starts talking and swells up to the size of large motorcycle, and that you suddenly find yourself on his back falling into what you could have sworn was just an old rug covered with pictures of knights galloping...

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works...

Beginning its life as the sensational entertainment of the eighteenth century, the novel has become the major literary genre of modern times. Drawing on hundreds of examples of famous novels from all over the world, Marina MacKay explores the essential aspects of the novel and its history: where novels came from and why we read them; how we think about their styles and techniques, their people, plots, places, and politics. Between the main chapters are longer readings of individual works, ...

Some of the most innovative and spell-binding literature has been written for young people, but only recently has academic study embraced its range and complexity. This Companion offers a state-of-the-subject survey of English-language children's literature from the seventeenth century to the present. With discussions ranging from eighteenth-century moral tales to modern fantasies by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the Companion illuminates acknowledged classics and many more neglected w...