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Oprah's Book Club sparked a revolution among readers by bringing
serious contemporary novels to the attention of a wider audience.
The Oprah's Book Club seal on a book led to instant fame and
bestseller status for authors--but, how did Oprah change the way
America reads and values books? Reading Oprah suggests that Oprah
initiated an all-important mantra--trust readers. Not only did the
public start reading accessible novels, but they also would snatch
up formidable titles and read them with a growing confidence and
skill. Then, they would talk about them, giving them a life beyond
the reader and text.
Popular fiction follows literature professors wherever they go. At
coffee shops or out for drinks, after faculty meetings or classes,
even at family reunions - they are persistently pressed to talk
about bestselling novels. Questions immediately follow: What do I
mean when I say a book is "good"? Why do contemporary novels like
these, conversations like these, matter to professors of
literature? Shouldn't they be spending their time re-reading The
Great Gatsby? The Ulysses Delusion confronts these questions and
answers their call for more engaged conversations about books.
Through topics like the Oprah's Book Club, Harry Potter, and Chick
Lit, Cecilia Konchar Farr explores the lively, democratic, and
gendered history of novels in the US as a context for understanding
how avid readers and literary professionals have come to assess
them so differently.
Popular fiction follows literature professors wherever they go. At
coffee shops or out for drinks, after faculty meetings or classes,
even at family reunions - they are persistently pressed to talk
about bestselling novels. Questions immediately follow: What do I
mean when I say a book is "good"? Why do contemporary novels like
these, conversations like these, matter to professors of
literature? Shouldn't they be spending their time re-reading The
Great Gatsby? The Ulysses Delusion confronts these questions and
answers their call for more engaged conversations about books.
Through topics like the Oprah's Book Club, Harry Potter, and Chick
Lit, Cecilia Konchar Farr explores the lively, democratic, and
gendered history of novels in the US as a context for understanding
how avid readers and literary professionals have come to assess
them so differently.
Contributions by Lauren R. Carmacci, Keridiana Chez, Kate Glassman,
John Granger, Marie Schilling Grogan, Beatrice Groves, Tolonda
Henderson, Nusaiba Imady, Cecilia Konchar Farr, Juliana Valadao
Lopes, Amy Mars, Christina Phillips-Mattson, Patrick McCauley,
Jennifer M. Reeher, Jonathan A. Rose, and Emily Strand Despite
their decades-long, phenomenal success, the Harry Potter novels
have attracted relatively little attention from literary critics
and scholars. While popular books, articles, blogs, and fan sites
for general readers proliferate, and while philosophers,
historians, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, and even
business professors have taken on book-length studies and edited
essay collections about Harry Potter, literature scholars, outside
of the children's books community, have paid few serious visits to
the Potterverse. Could it be that scholars are still reluctant to
recognize popular novels, especially those with genre labels
"children's literature" or "fantasy," as worthy subjects for
academic study? This book challenges that oversight, assembling and
foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars
trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their
importance to twenty-first-century literate culture. In Open at the
Close, contributors consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a
literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one. They interrogate
the novels on many levels, from multiple perspectives, and with
various conclusions, but they come together around the overarching
question: What is it about these books? At their heart, what is it
that makes the Harry Potter novels so exceptionally compelling, so
irresistible to their readers, and so relevant in our time?
Contributions by Lauren R. Carmacci, Keridiana Chez, Kate Glassman,
John Granger, Marie Schilling Grogan, Beatrice Groves, Tolonda
Henderson, Nusaiba Imady, Cecilia Konchar Farr, Juliana Valadao
Lopes, Amy Mars, Christina Phillips-Mattson, Patrick McCauley,
Jennifer M. Reeher, Jonathan A. Rose, and Emily Strand Despite
their decades-long, phenomenal success, the Harry Potter novels
have attracted relatively little attention from literary critics
and scholars. While popular books, articles, blogs, and fan sites
for general readers proliferate, and while philosophers,
historians, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, and even
business professors have taken on book-length studies and edited
essay collections about Harry Potter, literature scholars, outside
of the children's books community, have paid few serious visits to
the Potterverse. Could it be that scholars are still reluctant to
recognize popular novels, especially those with genre labels
"children's literature" or "fantasy," as worthy subjects for
academic study? This book challenges that oversight, assembling and
foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars
trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their
importance to twenty-first-century literate culture. In Open at the
Close, contributors consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a
literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one. They interrogate
the novels on many levels, from multiple perspectives, and with
various conclusions, but they come together around the overarching
question: What is it about these books? At their heart, what is it
that makes the Harry Potter novels so exceptionally compelling, so
irresistible to their readers, and so relevant in our time?
The Women's Liberation Movement held a foundational belief in the
written word's power to incite social change. In this new
collection, Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr curate essays
that reveal how second-wave feminists embraced this potential with
a vengeance. The authors in This Book Is an Action investigate the
dynamic print culture that emerged as the feminist movement
reawakened in the late 1960s. The works created by women shined a
light on taboo topics and offered inspiring accounts of personal
transformation. Yet, as the essayists reveal, the texts represented
something far greater: a distinct and influential American literary
renaissance. On the one hand, feminists took control of the process
by building a network of publishers and distributors owned and
operated by women. On the other, women writers threw off convention
to venture into radical and experimental forms, poetry, and genre
storytelling, and in so doing created works that raised the
consciousness of a generation. Examining feminist print culture
from its structures and systems to defining texts by Margaret
Atwood and Alice Walker, This Book Is an Action suggests untapped
possibilities for the critical and aesthetic analysis of the
diverse range of literary production during feminism's second wave.
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