An engaging, accessible guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.

Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven't because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.

The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.

The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

This illuminating book traces the development of Scottish women's writing in English from its genesis in the late eighteenth century to its flowering in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hindered initially by the hostility of the Presbyterian Church and the self-serving attitude of the male hierarchy which denied them a proper education, an astonishing number of women found opportunities, in the midst of domestic obligations, to write, and often publish - novels, poetry, diaries, journalism, letters, essays and reportage. Charlotte Waldie and Christina Keith visited, respectively, Waterloo and Flanders in the immediate aftermath of battle. Another intrepid writer, Emily Graves, wrote a memoir of her travels in Transylvania in The Light Beyond the Forest - from which Bram Stoker directly lifted the most blood-curdling elements of Dracula. Others remembered include literary multi-tasker and businesswoman Christian Isabel Johnstone; playwright Joanna Baillie; working-class poets Marion Bernstein and Janet Hamilton; novelist Susan Ferrier; memoirist Anne Grant of Laggan; and writer and scientist Mary Somerville, depicted on the cover, after whom Somerville College, Oxford is named.

With no comparable study in the English language, the first English translation of Fan Boqun's A History of Popular Modern Chinese Literature presents one of the most authoritative and significant studies on modern Chinese literature to a new readership. Starting in the late Qing Dynasty, a period often overlooked by literary scholars, Fan maps the blueprint of modern Chinese popular literature through a broad range of popular literary genres. Thoughtfully illustrated throughout and utilising courtesan novels, martial arts fiction, pictorial journalism and detective novels, Fan's innovative approach to this rich material develops pioneering new arguments which will be of interest to all interested in modern Chinese literature, popular and visual culture in late Qing and Republican China.

A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. Attending to literary, digital, visual, cinematic, televisual, and aural forms of storytelling, this book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with senior and emerging scholars. This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies which have been appearing in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. From mind-centred and philosophical approaches to theories focusing on gender, race, and sexuality, the chapters touch on poetry, drama, digital games, podcasts, coding, speculative fiction, the law, medical narrative, oral storytelling, and comics as well as the more traditional areas of fiction, TV, and film. This is the future of narrative theory. Key Features: Includes popular culture genres (comics, video games, coding) not covered in depth in other companions to narrative theory Showcases essays on narrative dimensions of law, medical ethics, linguistics, and philosophy as well as more obviously narrative genres Attention given to race, gender, sexuality distributed throughout the volume, not isolated in a single section New essays by superstars in narrative theory (Phelan, McHale, Lanser, Richardson, Abbott, Currie) as well as other well respected and emerging scholars

This volume lists all the important work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1992 and 1996. This bibliographic work is a continuation of the earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 9000 entries, some of which areannotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources. Also included are a substantial number of African newspaper and magazine articles.

*A TIME, New Yorker, Financial Times and History Today Book of the Year* 'Hilarious' Sam Leith 'I loved this book' Susie Dent' 'Witty and affectionate' Lynne Truss Perfect for book lovers, a delightful history of the wonders to be found in the humble book index Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and - of course - indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.

Edited collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible to potential readers once published. It is also often taken as axiomatic that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding do so agree. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format before even a word is read. After examining the origins of this critique, this Element explores the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. It examines each component part of the critique, showing that they are either largely unfounded or susceptible of solution. It proposes the edited collection as a model of one possible idea of scholarly community: collaboration, trust, and mutual obligation in pursuit of a wider good.

Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and social and political significance was produced throughout Europe and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c.1400) well into the eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specifically to the enormous wealth and variety of neo-Latin literature, and offers both essential background to the understanding of this material and sixteen chapters by leading scholars which are devoted to individual forms. Each contributor relates a wide range of fascinating but now little-known texts to the handful of more familiar Latin works of the period, such as Thomas More's Utopia, Milton's Latin poetry and the works of Petrarch and Erasmus. All Latin is translated throughout the volume.

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representation Places refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities research Brings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politics The refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness. Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

This book re-examines the literary significance of poet and translator William Cowper (1731-1800). Too often, Cowper is pigeonholed as an eccentric, a hopeless depressive, or even as a religious lunatic. Often regarded as an 'early' Romantic, Cowper is reconsidered in this book in light of a rich eighteenth-century political and religious culture. Rather than read him as an old-fashioned Calvinist stranded in an increasingly secularized society, Cowper can be read as someone who well understood the increasingly imprecise and emotionalist quality of eighteenth-century religious discourse and who expressed this dominant tendency with uncanny insight.

Kerouac. Ginsberg. Burroughs. These are the most famous names of the Beat Generation, but in fact they were only the front line of a much more wide-ranging literary and cultural movement. This critical history takes readers through key works by these authors, but also radiates out to discuss dozens more writers and their works, showing how they all contributed to one of the most far-reaching literary movements of the post-World War II era. Moving from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, this book explores key aesthetic and thematic innovations of the Beat writers, the pervasiveness of the Beatnik caricature, the role of the counterculture in the post-war era, the involvement of women in the Beat project, and the changing face of Beat political engagement during the Vietnam War era.

A comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and other writing, including literary criticism and prose fiction Celebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and national traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. The book covers all aspects and periods of the author's career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III and those works published after her death. It also examines how Bishop's work has been read and reinterpreted by contemporary writers. Key Features Provides a companion to Bishop's entire artistic oeuvre, including letter writing, literary criticism and short story writing Offers a sustained consideration of Bishop's identity politics, including the role of race Studies Bishop's influence on contemporary culture

Across fiction, journalism, ethnography, and history, William T. Vollmann's oeuvre-which includes a "prostitution trilogy," a septology (Seven Dreams) about encounters between first North Americans and European colonists, and a more than three-thousand-page philosophical treatise on violence-is ambitious as it is dazzling. Conversations with William T. Vollmann collects twenty-nine interviews, from early press coverage in Britain where his career first took flight, to in-depth visits to his writing and art studio in Sacramento, California. Throughout these conversations, Vollmann (b. 1959) speaks with candor and wit on such Subjects as grief and guilt in his work, his love of guns and his experience of war, the responsibilities of the artist as witness, the benefits of looking out into the world beyond the confines of one's horizon, the limitations of what literature can achieve, and how we can speak to the future. Bringing to the fore several expanded, unpublished, and hard-to-find interviews, this volume offers a valuable Set of perspectives on a uniquely rewarding and sometimes overwhelming writer. On the road promoting his books or in a domestic Setting, Vollmann comes across as reflective and humane, humble in his craft despite deep dedication to his uncompromising vision, and ever armed with a spirit of mischief and capacity to shock and unSettle the reader.

The nineteenth century was seemingly a period of great progress. Huge advancements and achievements were made in science, technology and industry that transformed life and work alike. But a growing pride in modernity and innovation was tainted by a sense of the loss of the past and the multiple threats which novelty posed. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought provides an impressive survey of the period's major ideas and trends. Leading scholars explore some of the most influential concepts and debates within philosophy, history, political thought, economics, religion and the social sciences, as well as feminism and imperialism. Some of these debates continued into the following century and many still remain relevant in the present day. This Companion is an excellent tool for readers seeking to understand the genesis of modern discourse across a range of humanities and social science subjects.

The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.

Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.

"This introduction to the grammar of both classical and modern literary Arabic is the best I have seen." Middle East Journal

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. One of James's strangest works, The Sacred Fount, explores ideas of sexual desire and power in an English country house setting. The novel aroused considerable critical bewilderment and hostility on its original publication in 1901 but was retrieved by a subsequent generation of critics who found its ambiguity and stylistic elaboration an instance of James's 'mastery' and an early example of literary modernism. This is the first critical edition of James' landmark text and is supported by a full critical apparatus including introduction, notes, glossary, textual variants and bibliography. The volume will be of interest to researchers, scholars and advanced students of Henry James, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American fiction and literature.

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection examine a wide variety of literature-travel, memoir, and fiction-and explore the ways travel and ideas of "culture" have evolved since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. The sites of the Grand Tour remain a powerful cultural draw, and they continue to define ideas of taste and learning for those who visit them.

Trust in media and political institutions is at an all-time low in America, yet veterans enjoy an unmatched level of credibility and moral authority. Their war stories have become crucial testimony about the nation's leadership, foreign policies, and wars. Veterans' memoirs are not simply self-revelatory personal chronicles but contributions to political culture-to the stories circulated and incorporated into national myths and memories. American War Stories centers on an extensive selection of memoirs written by veterans of the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan conflicts-including Brian Turner's My Life as a Foreign Country, Marcus Luttrell's Lone Survivor, and Camilo Mejia's Road from ar Ramadi-to explore the complex relationship between memory and politics in the context of postmodern war. Placing veterans' stories in conversation with broader cultural and political discourses, Myra Mendible analyzes the volatile mix of agendas, identities, and issues informing veteran-writers' narrative choices to argue that their work plays an important, though underexamined, political function in how Americans remember and judge their wars.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot includes several new chapters, providing an essential introduction to all aspects of Eliot's life and writing. Accessible essays by some of the most distinguished scholars of Victorian literature provide lucid and original insights into the work of one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century, author most famously of Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda. From an introduction that traces her originality as a realist novelist, the book moves on to extensive considerations of each of Eliot's novels, her life and her publishing history. Chapters address the problems of money, philosophy, religion, politics, gender and science, as they are developed in her novels. With its supplementary materials, including a chronology and an extensive section of suggested readings, this Companion is an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of imagining the totality of literature; comparing literary works across histories, cultures and languages; and understanding how literary production is affected by forces such as imperialism and globalization. The essays demonstrate how detailed critical engagements with particular literary texts call forth differing conceptions of world literature, and, conversely, how theories of world literature shape our practices of readings. Subjects covered include cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, internationalism, scale and systems, sociological criticism, translation, scripts, and orality. This book also includes original analyses of genres and forms, ranging from tragedy to the novel and graphic fiction, lyric poetry to the short story and world cinema.

This volume, an important contribution to dialogic and Bakhtin studies, shows the natural fit between Bakhtin's ideas and the pluralistic culture of India to a global academic audience. It is premised on the fact that long before principles of dialogism took shape in the Western world, these ideas, though not labelled as such, were an integral part of intellectual histories in India. Bakhtin's ideas and intellectual traditions of India stand under the same banner of plurality, open-endedness and diversity of languages and social speech types and, therefore, the affinity between the thinker and the culture seems natural. Rather than being a mechanical import of Bakhtin's ideas, it is an occasion to reclaim, reactivate and reenergize inherent dialogicality in the Indian cultural, historical and philosophical histories. Bakhtin is not an incidental figure, for he offers precise analytical tools to make sense of the incredibly complex differences at every level in the cultural life of India. Indian heterodoxy lends well to a Bakhtinian reading and analysis and the papers herein attest to this. The papers range from how ideas from Indo-European philology reached Bakhtin through a circuitous route, to responses to Bakhtin's thought on the carnival from the philosophical perspectives of Abhinavagupta, to a Bakhtinian reading of literary texts from India. The volume also includes an essay on 'translation as dialogue' - an issue central to multilingual cultures - and on inherent dialogicality in the long intellectual traditions in India.