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'It is a clever, well-written book, and I often found myself
underlining whole paragraphs as I read. ... wonderfully insightful.
... I've never read accounts of any of these texts that manage to
be at once so searching and so wondrously concise, and Lupton made
me want to go back to them all' Rachel Cooke, Observer
'Incandescent' Lara Feigel, Guardian 'A subversive, brilliant and
beautifully written book about love, play and power in fiction and
in the well-read life' - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater 'A
delicious combination of critical thought and passionate personal
experience.' - Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep
Romantic love was born alongside the novel, and books have been
shaping how we experience and think about our most intimate stories
ever since. But what do novels give us when our own lives diverge
from the usual narrative paths? Christina is a professor used to
examining stories with a critical eye; until one day in middle age
she finds herself falling in love and leaving her marriage for a
romance with another woman. This involves a familiar enough tale,
but when her new partner suffers a stroke, Tina begins to reflect
on the sorts of love that novels rarely capture. A heady mix of
memoir, criticism and storytelling that draws on novels ranging
from Pride and Prejudice to Price of Salt, Anna Karenina to
Conversations with Friends, to illuminate the ways love and novels
work, and show how some types of love, which don't race to a
narrative end-point, might be the most important of all.
"He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much
attention." Pride and Prejudice , one of the most famous love
stories of all time, has also proven itself as a treasured mainstay
of the English literary canon. With the arrival of eligible young
men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and
their five daughters are turned inside out and upside down. Pride
encounters prejudice, upward-mobility confronts social disdain, and
quick-wittedness challenges sagacity. Misconceptions and hasty
judgements bring heartache and scandal, but eventually lead to true
understanding, self-knowledge, and love. It's almost impossible to
open Pride and Prejudice without feeling the pressure of so many
readers having known and loved this novel already. Will you fail
the test - or will you love it too? As a story that celebrates more
unflinchingly than any of Austen's other novels the happy
meeting-of-true-minds, and one that has attracted the most fans
over the centuries, Pride and Prejudice sets up an echo chamber of
good feelings in which romantic love and the love of reading
amplify each other.
Brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and
discourse analysis to read 18th-century British philosophy in its
historical context. This work analyses how the philosophers of the
Enlightenment viewed their writing; and, how their institutional
positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of
human consciousness.
This collection features leading literary critics and explores the
role of language in thinking about the ways in which the world
might be otherwise, and the history of contingency as a
longstanding literary concept. The defining feature of contingency
lies in the suggestion that things that have already happened might
have been otherwise. Central to late twentieth century European
critical and sociological thinking, that argument is at the centre
of this volume. The contributors to this volume explore subjects
including how literature, philosophy and history all cope with
contingency; the existence of contingency in genres as diverse as
enlightenment fables, Aristotle, Hardy, Jane Austen, and post-war
American literature; the contingency of old age and the poetics of
contingency. As the chapters here illustrate, our efforts to
understand each other involve a constant opening onto being
otherwise; an enterprise in which the role of the literary critic
remains key. Of interest to scholars across a range of literary
genres, this volume would also have applications for philosophy
researchers exploring the metaphysics of contingency. This book was
originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.
Brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and
discourse analysis to read 18th-century British philosophy in its
historical context. This work analyses how the philosophers of the
Enlightenment viewed their writing; and, how their institutional
positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of
human consciousness.
It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central
characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset
collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different
forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical
fiction and serialized works.
It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central
characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset
collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different
forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical
fiction and serialized works.
It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central
characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset
collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different
forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical
fiction and serialized works.
It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central
characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset
collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different
forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical
fiction and serialized works.
It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central
characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset
collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different
forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical
fiction and serialized works.
How did eighteenth-century readers find and make time to read?
Books have always posed a problem of time for readers. Becoming
widely available in the eighteenth century-when working hours
increased and lighter and quicker forms of reading (newspapers,
magazines, broadsheets) surged in popularity-the material form of
the codex book invited readers to situate themselves creatively in
time. Drawing on letters, diaries, reading logs, and a range of
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels, Christina Lupton's
Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century concretely
describes how book-readers of the past carved up, expanded, and
anticipated time. Placing canonical works by Elizabeth Inchbald,
Henry Fielding, Amelia Opie, and Samuel Richardson alongside those
of lesser-known authors and readers, Lupton approaches books as
objects that are good at attracting particular forms of attention
and paths of return. In contrast to the digital interfaces of our
own moment and the ephemeral newspapers and pamphlets read in the
1700s, books are rarely seen as shaping or keeping modern time.
However, as Lupton demonstrates, books are often put down and
picked up, they are leafed through as well as read sequentially,
and they are handed on as objects designed to bridge temporal
distances. In showing how discourse itself engages with these
material practices, Lupton argues that reading is something to be
studied textually as well as historically. Applying modern
theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, and Bernard
Stiegler, Lupton offers a rare phenomenological approach to the
study of a concrete historical field. This compelling book stands
out for the combination of archival research, smart theoretical
inquiry, and autobiographical reflection it brings into play.
This collection features leading literary critics and explores the
role of language in thinking about the ways in which the world
might be otherwise, and the history of contingency as a
longstanding literary concept. The defining feature of contingency
lies in the suggestion that things that have already happened might
have been otherwise. Central to late twentieth century European
critical and sociological thinking, that argument is at the centre
of this volume. The contributors to this volume explore subjects
including how literature, philosophy and history all cope with
contingency; the existence of contingency in genres as diverse as
enlightenment fables, Aristotle, Hardy, Jane Austen, and post-war
American literature; the contingency of old age and the poetics of
contingency. As the chapters here illustrate, our efforts to
understand each other involve a constant opening onto being
otherwise; an enterprise in which the role of the literary critic
remains key. Of interest to scholars across a range of literary
genres, this volume would also have applications for philosophy
researchers exploring the metaphysics of contingency. This book was
originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.
The eighteenth century has long been associated with realism and
objective description, modes of representation that deemphasize
writing. But in the middle decades of the century, Christina Lupton
observes, authors described with surprising candor the material and
economic facets of their own texts' production. In Knowing Books
Lupton examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources, including
sermons, graffiti, philosophical texts, and magazines, which
illustrate the range and character of mid-century experiments with
words announcing their status as physical objects. Books that
"know" their own presence on the page and in the reader's hand
become, in Lupton's account, tantalizing objects whose
entertainment value competes with that of realist narrative.
Knowing Books introduces these mid-eighteenth-century works as part
of a long history of self-conscious texts being greeted as
fashionable objects. Poststructuralist and Marxist approaches to
literature celebrate the consciousness of writing and economic
production as belonging to revolutionary understandings of the
world, but authors of the period under Lupton's gaze expose the
facts of mediation without being revolutionary. On the contrary,
their explication of economic and material processes shores up
their claim to material autonomy and economic success. Lupton uses
media theory and close reading to suggest the desire of
eighteenth-century readers to attribute sentience to technologies
and objects that entertain them. Rather than a historical study of
print technology, Knowing Books offers a humanist interpretation of
the will to cede agency to media. This horizon of theoretical
engagement makes Knowing Books at once an account of the least
studied decades of the eighteenth century and a work of relevance
for those interested in new attitudes toward media in the
twenty-first.
Drawing on an ethnographic study of novel readers in Denmark and
the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, this book provides a snapshot
of a phenomenal moment in modern history. The ethnographic approach
shows what no historical account of books published during the
pandemic will be able to capture, namely the movement of readers
between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. The
book follows readers who have tuned into novels about plague,
apocalypse, and racial violence, but also readers whose taste for
older novels, and for re-reading novels they knew earlier in their
lives, has grown. Alternating between chapters that analyse single
texts that were popular (Albert Camus's The Plague, Ali Smith's
Summer, Charlotte Broente's Jane Eyre) and others that describe
clusters of, for example, dystopian fiction and nature writing,
this work brings out the diverse quality of the Covid-19 bookshelf.
Time is of central importance to this study, both in terms of the
time of lockdown and the temporality of reading itself within this
wider disrupted sense of time. By exploring these varied
experiences, this book investigates the larger question of how the
consumption of novels depends on and shapes people's experience of
non-work time, providing a specific lens through which to examine
the phenomenology of reading more generally. This timely work also
negotiates debates in the study of reading that distinguish
theoretically between critical reading and reading for pleasure,
between professional and lay reading. All sides of the sociological
and literary debate must be brought to bear in understanding what
readers tell us about what novels have meant to them in this
complex historical moment.
Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered
begins with the brute fact that poetry jostled up alongside novels
in the bookstalls of eighteenth-century England. Indeed, by
exploring unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and
novels, this volume of exciting, new essays offers a
reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period.
The novel poached from and featured poetry, and the "modern"
subjects and objects privileged by "rise of the novel" scholarship
are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with
indistinct boundaries. Contributors: Margaret Doody, David Fairer,
Sophie Gee, Heather Keenleyside, Shelley King, Christina Lupton,
Kate Parker, Natalie Phillips, Aran Ruth, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joshua
Swidzinski, and Courtney Weiss Smith.
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