Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages Shows the experiences of ordinary readers in Scotland, Australasia, Russia, and China Explores how digital media has transformed literary criticism Portrays everyday reading in art Includes reading across national and cultural lines Common Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives.

This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Gald&#243s's first series of Episodios nacionales, Pio Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas Clarin's La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixoticism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy. The book's conclusion suggests that the external authors, who wrote these novels about quixotic author-characters' lingering romanticism, imagine themselves as Cervantes figures: they draw on the power of romanticism within their texts, but protect themselves from romanticism's 'dangerous' links to the feminine and irrationality by recalling their male mentor. This study, then, situates itself in the critical tradition that has articulated the porosity of the terms romanticism and realism - the indissoluble marriage of the Hispanic nineteenth century.

Reading and Riding traces the foundation and development of Louis Hachette's Bibliothe'que des Chemins de Fer and its impact on the social, political, and cultural history of nineteenth-century France.

Engaging with a wide range of texts on gift-theory, extending from Senecas De Beneficiis to Derridas Given Time, Selfish Gifts examines the importance of gift ethics and the rhetoric of honorable giving to the literature of late Elizabeth and early Stuart England. It demonstrates that the ideal of the freely given and disinterested gift shaped the language of early modern clientage, along with literary representations of patrons and patronage systems during this period. Selfish Gifts examines how early modern clients moved quickly and strategically to assimilate the language of competition and equality, characteristic of an emerging market economy, within their existing discourses of gift exchange, in order to maximize the rewards they might induce from an increasingly diverse group of patrons. To give is to exercise power and thus, as numerous modern gift-theorists and anthropologists elucidate, the gift is implicitly self-interested even as it derives value from appearing altruistic; nowhere is this paradox more significant than in a patronage economy such as that which shaped literary production in early modern England. In pursuing that paradox and its implications, Selfish Gifts highlights crucial connections and cultural tensions between political and sexual giving, between 'giving' truth and flattery, between the sovereignty and subjection of gift donor/recipient, and between strategic and so-called 'sacrificial' giving. Those tensions are examined in the context of the latter years of Elizabeth Is rule, through the contrasting reign of James I and up to the early Caroline period. Selfish Gifts demonstrates the prominence of the gift ideal in Renaissance England and suggests the disturbing social and political consequences for those who give contrary to that ideal by bestowing self-interested gifts, by refusing to give, or by giving egotistically. The book establishes the centrality of gift theory to the discourses of patronage, friendship, and sovereignty, sugg

At once political institution, lived experience, and discursive figure, exile defined Louis XIV's absolutist France. The Place of Exile connects the movements of both people and books through and around this absolutist territory in order to understand the deliberate construction of real and imagined marginal cultures. Four case studies of everyday, sociable writing called leisure literature guide us through an ever-widening territory of disaffection and alienation, from the center of absolutism at Louis XIV's first court to Europe's international communities of refugees. Those least likely to be considered political writers-banished noble women, novel writers, poor refugees-used literature to consider the viability of a world beyond authority's reach. More importantly, leisure literature confronted one of the major paradoxes of the grand siecle: the shifting possibilities for selfhood available in a society increasingly defined by radical divisions, whether beyond exile and grace, inside and out, interiority and exteriority.

BIOGRAPHY A] LITERARY CRITICISM A] GAY & LESBIAN STUDIES-->

Audre Lorde (1934A92), the author of eleven books of poetry, described herself as a "Black feminist lesbian poet warrior mother," but she added that this phrase was inadequate in capturing her full identity. The interviews in this collection portray the many additional sides of the Harlem-born author and activist. She was also a rebellious child of Caribbean parents, a mastectomy patient, a blue-collar worker, a college professor, a student of African mythology, an experimental autobiographer in her book titled "Zami," a critic of imperialism, and a charismatic orator.

Despite her intense engagement with the major social movements of her time, Lorde told interviewers that she was always an outsider, a position of weakness and of strength.

Most of her schoolmates were white. She married a white legal-aid attorney, and after their divorce she was the partner of a white psychologist for many years. These intimate alliances with whites caused some African Americans of both genders to question the depth of her solidarity. Lorde expressed distrust of some white feminists and charged that they lacked real understanding of African American struggles.

Writing proved to be her powerful weapon against injustice. Painfully aware that differences could provoke prejudice and violence, she promoted the bridging of barriers. These interviews reveal the sense of displacement that made Lorde a champion of the outcast and the forgotten--whether in New York, Mississippi, Berlin, or Soweto.

Joan Wylie Hall, the author of "Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction," teaches English at the University of Mississippi. Her work hasbeen published in the "Faulkner Journal," "Studies in Short Fiction," "Mississippi Quarterly," and "Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers,"

The Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) is best known for his revival of physiognomy, or the ancient art of judging character from physical appearance. His writings on physiognomy, rapidly translated into the major European languages, made him a celebrity in his lifetime. Although they were always controversial, Lavater's theories had a pervasive and long-lasting influence on art, literature, medicine, and the emerging social sciences. Physiognomy in Profile affirms and assesses Lavater's contribution to European culture in the two hundred years since his death. It examines how his vision of physiognomy as a viable method of interpreting the modern world has repeatedly been affirmed and challenged. Even today, at the turn of the twenty-first century, this study reveals that Lavater's ideas have a surprising resilience. The book adopts a cross-disciplinary approach, focusing on the novel, press and periodical literature, painting, drawing, photography, caricature, encyclopedias, and medical texts. It brings together the work of scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia.

This book offers the latest scholarship on this influential series of essays. Taking advantage of the insights provided by such critical perspectives as new historicism, feminism, postcolonialism, psychology, postmodernism, and cultural studies, the scholars represented here take a fresh look at The Spectator and its relation to the changing culture that influenced it-and was influenced by it. A variety of cultural changes in the seventeenth century-political, social, and economic, to name a few of the major ones-destabilized the values and beliefs that organized and cemented the aristocratic/court hegemony of the late seventeenth century. Consequently, a multiplicity of discourses jockeyed for authority to redefine conventional aristocratic notions of morality, religion, politics, economics, class, gender, taste, art, and create new cultural identities and new categories of social status. The essays in this volume examine these discourses as they manifest themselves in The Spectator.

In this well-illustrated text, Dr. Denney asserts that the artists who image Diana, Princess of Wales, have framed her according to a cultural memory based on traditions of royal portraiture and according to twentieth-century reassertions (that is, reframings) of the debate over feminism and femininity in visual culture. Art historians and literary critics have examined the visual culture of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, and more recently, images of women in the court of Charles II, but no one has addressed, as the author does here, the impact of imaging Diana, Princess of Wales, at a time in British culture when feminism and femininity collide. Dr. Denney critiques art historical traditions of portraiture in order to argue that a princess must perform a constructed role of femininity, one that corresponds to Victorian codes of royal protocol, visual practice, and behavior. The book encompasses themes of marriage, motherhood, philanthropy, royal dress, and autobiography. Through an examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, photographs, engravings, and popular illustrations, the study engages a comparative visual dialogue on the imaging of royal women. Looking particularly at the nineteenth-century Princess of Wales, Alexandra (born Princess Alexandra of Denmark), the author reveals the persistence of a cultural memory in terms of the proper roles and behaviors of a princess from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. By looking at portraits of Diana, Princess of Wales, in conjunction with past royal portraits, the study determines that she, like Princess Alexandra before her, is conscious of tradition and employs it as a matter of survival. The book's methods in this regard include an exploration of royal portrait traditions, gender studies, popular journalism, theories on feminist biography and autobiography, as well as costume theory and history to contextualize the representation of Diana, Princess of Wales. How does one address the insistence on

This is the book on all of Tolkien's invented languages, spoken by hobbits, elves, and men of Middle-earth -- a dicitonary of fourteen languages, an English-Elvish glossary, all the runes and alphabets, and material on Tolkien the linguist.

Jo Walton is an award-winning author of, inveterate reader of, and chronic re-reader of science fiction and fantasy books. What Makes This Book So Great? is a selection of the best of her musings about her prodigious reading habit. Jo Walton's many subjects range from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. Among them, the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by 'mainstream'; the under-appreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field's many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers.

Mapping Discord examines a series of allegorical maps published in France during the seventeenth century that cast in spatial terms a number of heated aesthetic and social debates. It discusses the convergence of map-making and literary creation in the context of early modern cartographic practice, and demonstrates that the unique language of allegorical cartography raises important theoretical questions about the relations between rationalist discourses of science and the figural designs of imaginative writing. In detailed analyses of the imaginary maps that appeared in the seventeenth-century novels and stories, as well as of maps, atlases, and geographic treatises produced by professional scholars and engineers of the period, Mapping Discord considers the ideological structure and uses of cartographic language, and argues that allegorical maps have much to tell us about the potential capacity of every map to operate as a visual metaphor for power. Illustrated.

This is the first book in the English language devoted to an analysis of the work ofthe Mozambican author Mia Couto. The book provides essential background details about Mozambican political and cultural history.

The Scottish and French Enlightenments are arguably the two intellectual movements of the eighteenth century that were the most influential in shaping the modern age. The essays in Scotland and France in the Enlightenment explore a wide range of topics of historical relevance to eighteenth-century scholars, while engaging students with broad interdisciplinary interests in the humanities and social sciences. The ways in which Scottish philosophy influenced French painting, how the Encyclopaedia Britannica presented the French Revolution, the impact of Macpherson's Ossian on the development of French Romanticism, the moral education of children, the relation between reflection and perception in the arts and in moral life, humankind's relationship to other animals, and the links between violence and imagination, and fear and sanity, are only some of the topics covered. This challenging selection of essays comparing Scottish and French enlightenment views of natural history, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, history and art history complicates and enriches the notion of "Enlightenment," and will inaugurate a new field of Franco-Scottish studies.

Admired and Understood analyzes Behn's only pure verse collection, Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), and situates her in her literary milieu. Her book demonstrates her desire for acceptance in her literary culture, to be 'admired and understood, ' the antithesis of what many surmise from reading her other works that she saw herself primarily as a guerilla critic of her culture's views on race, class, and gender. Although the collapse of the market for new plays in the 1680s probably drove Behn to poetry and later to fiction, other factors explain her devotion to her collection. One may have been the status associated with writing poetry as opposed to plays and stories. The title of poet was her culture's ultimate literary currency. She apparently never wished to be seen as a 'woman writer, ' and viewed such labels as reductive, unfair, and inaccurate. Published in 1684, playwright Aphra Behn's Poems Upon Several Occasions is her only collection of pure verse. In this study, Stapleton analyzes these poems and situates Behn in her literary milieu. Topics include the influence of Abraham Cowley on Behn's poetics, Behn's understanding of libertinism, and the textual history of 'On a Juniper-Tree.'"

Imagine a world without Principia Mathematica, Rights of Man, the Bible, Shakespeare, or the Mahabharata. Books that Changed History features 75 of the world's most momentous titles - from The Art of War to Anne Frank's Diary - and reveals their far-ranging impact. Books are the medium through which scientists, storytellers, and philosophers introduce their ideas. Discover seminal religious and political titles, cornerstones of science such as On the Origin of Species, and ancient texts such as the I Ching, which is still used today to answer fundamental questions about human existence. Get up close to see fascinating details, such as Versalius' exquisite anatomical illustrations in Epitome, Leonardo da Vinci's annotated notebooks, or the hand-decorated pages in the Gutenberg Bible. Discover why Euclid's Elements of Geometry was the most influential maths title ever published, and marvel at rare treasures such as the Aubin Codex, which tells the history of the Aztecs and the early Spanaish colonial period in Mexico. Books that Changed History gathers stories, diaries, scientific treatises, plays, dictionaries, and religious texts into a stunning celebration of the power of books.

'Generous, enjoyable and well informed.' Observer '500 expertly potted plots and personal comments on a wide range of pop and proper prose fiction.' The Times ___________________________________________________________ Ranging all the way from Aaron's Rod to Zuleika Dobson, via The Devil Rides Out and Middlemarch, literary connoisseur and sleuth John Sutherland offers his very personal guide to the most rewarding, most remarkable and, on occasion, most shamelessly enjoyable works of fiction ever written. He brilliantly captures the flavour of each work and assesses its relative merits and demerits. He shows how it fits into a broader context and he offers endless snippets of intriguing information: did you know, for example, that the Nazis banned Bambi or that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow; that Voltaire completed Candide in three days, or that Anna Sewell was paid GBP20 for Black Beauty? It is also effectively a history of the novel in 500 or so wittily informative, bite-sized pieces. Encyclopaedic and entertaining by turns, this is a wonderful dip-in book, whose opinions will inform and on occasion, no doubt, infuriate. __________________________________________________ 'Anyone hooked on fiction should be warned: this book will feed your addiction.' Mail on Sunday 'A dazzling array of genres, periods, styles and tastes... chatty, insightful, unprejudiced (but not uncritical) and wise.' Times Literary Supplement

Bruce F. Murphy's The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is a comprehensive guide to the genre of the murder mystery that catalogues thousands of items in a broad range of categories: authors, titles, plots, characters, weapons, methods of killing, movie and theatrical adaptations. What distinguishes this encyclopedia from the others in the field is its critical stance.

Emotion as Meaning offers a new model of the mind based upon a new understanding of emotion. It resolves the debate between the imagists and the propositionalists by tracing the translation of language into vicarious experience, showing that the mind represents the imagined world by means of not only image and idea, but emotion.

Culture and Consciousness argues that the vast interdisciplinary boom in consciousness research has enormous implications for literary and cultural studies, and that the potential benefits of this research in the twenty-first century are momentous. Its objective is to show how consciousness studies can help us reassess our approach to key issues and the fundamental assumptions of contemporary theory and criticism. In the first half of the book, major points of contention in the humanities are explored through a perspective that accommodates the full range of mind and consciousness. Haney demonstrates that the debates in theory surrounding the questions of identity, truth and language, which have so far eluded the mind or reason, cannot be resolved without recourse to the structure of consciousness and intersubjectivity - an interaction mediated by language and resulting in mutual agreement. The remaining chapters apply the notion of intersubjectivity to the reading of specific works. A key implication of this book is that questions of literary and cultural theory concerning binaries such as presence and absence, pattern and randomness, the given and the made, the individual and the collective will continue to elude the mind as a reservoir of rational thought. Finally, Haney contends that at a certain level the duality of self and other is overcome in an experience of unity.

Showcases Ezra Pound's close involvement with the arts throughout his career The present volume of new, interdisciplinary scholarship investigates the arts with which Pound had a lifelong interaction including architecture, ballet, cinema, music, painting, photography and sculpture. Divided into 5 historically and thematically arranged sections, the 28 chapters foreground the shifting significance of art forms throughout Pound's life which he spent in London, Paris, Rapallo and Washington. The Companion maps Pound's practices of engagement with the arts, deepening areas of study that have recently emerged, such as his musical compositions. At the same time, it opens up new fields, particularly Pound's interaction with the performing arts: opera, dance, and cinema. The volume demonstrates overall that Ezra Pound was no mere spectator of the modernist revolution in the arts; rather he was an agent of change, a doer and promoter who also had a deep emotional response to the arts. Key Features: The first book to gather together all the different aspects of the subject of Pound and the arts Chapters are devoted to topics never covered before: (cinema; political anarchism; early music; Agnes Bedford; the artists Munch, Lekakis, Martinelli, Frampton) Presents the ways Pound's interests and activities in the arts change over time in a continuous story, from his beginnings to his old age Includes portraits of friendships and short biographies of artists connected to Pound, showing his personal impact in the arts world

This is a close textual analysis of Rushdie's five major novels: Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Moor's Last Sigh. Rushdie recognizes that practicing identity politics leads to nativism and nationalism, categories he rejects because they merely invert the colonizer/colonized binary, leaving violent hierarchies intact. His impulse is to deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary and in doing so to clear a 'new' postmodern space. This text employs post-structuralist/ postmodern theory not only to address the issues of representation that Rushdie raises in his major political novels, but also to facilitate a discussion of the manner in which he pushes the boundaries of the modern novel.