The purpose of this book is to present to scholars, students and enthusiasts in the fields of literature and linguistics a way to study a text analytically. Reading is multi-faceted and shaped by contexts, participants, and technologies. The ways of reading tackled most enthusiastically in this book are interpretations which show active involvement of readers: Each literary or linguistic approach can be compared to a window through which we see, grapple, comprehend, personalize and internalize the text, hence the world.

Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film: Song of Death in Paradise explores the combination of two motifs, death and gardens, to show how the two subjects are intertwined and used in various media and cultural contexts. Using cultural, literary, film, and art history theories, the contributors analyze various death and garden sceneries in literary works by Arthur Machen, Agatha Christie, J.K. Rowling, as well as in superhero comics, films, and cultural and art contexts such as Ian Hamilton Finley's "Little Sparta," the poetic verses from the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden in South Africa, and the Australian wilderness.

Aestheticism is broader in scope than the philosophy of art. It is also broader than the philosophy of beauty, in that it applies to any of the responses we might expect works of art or entertainment to elicit, whether positive or negative. That is why the articles in this collective volume aim to highlight the various reverberations of aestheticism on literature and education over the centuries.