Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women's reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstores of our time, exploring what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages.

Jack traces a history marked by persistent efforts to prevent women from gaining literacy or reading what they wished. She also recounts the counter-efforts of those who have battled for girls' access to books and education. The book introduces frustrated...

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader provides a comprehensive selection of contemporary and modern essays on the most important novels of the period. By bringing together a range of material written across two centuries, it offers an insight into the changing reception of realist fiction and a discussion of how complex debates about the meaning and function of realism informed and shaped the kind of fiction that was written in the nineteenth century. The novels discussed are: Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, Dombey and Son, Middlemarch,...

The popular yet complex work of Joseph Conrad has attracted much critical attention over the years, from the perspectives of postcolonial, modernist, cultural and gender studies. This guide to his compelling work presents:

• an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Conrad's texts, from publication to the present
• an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Conrad's life and work, situated in a broader critical history
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links...

The History of Reading offers an engaging, accessible overview from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of 'book clubs'.

Divided into seven sections, each with a useful introduction, this Reader:

• summarises the main debates and perspectives shaping the field
• introduces key theorists such as Iser, Fish and Bakhtin
• surveys influential works and outlines important studies on mass reading
• focuses on specific communities such as Welsh miners, African American library users and Australian convicts
• looks...

This collection analyses the future of 'trauma theory', a major theoretical discourse in contemporary criticism and theory. The chapters advance the current state of the field by exploring new areas, asking new questions and making new connections.

Part one, History and Culture, begins by developing trauma theory in its more familiar post-deconstructive mode and explores how these insights might still be productive. It goes on, via a critique of existing positions, to relocate trauma theory in a postcolonial and globalized world, theoretically, aesthetically and...

• Tracks satire from its first appearances in the prophetic books of the Old Testament through the Renaissance and the English tradition in satire to Michael Moore's satirical movie Fahrenheit 9/11.
  
• Highlights the important influence of the Bible in the literary and cultural development of Western satire.
  
• Focused mainly on major classical and European influences on and works of English satire, but also explores...

Wrapped in the glow of the computer or phone screen, we cruise websites; we skim and skip. We glance for a brief moment at whatever catches our eye and then move on. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age reminds us of another mode of reading--the kind that requires our full attention and that has as its goal not the mere gathering of information but the deeper understanding that only good books can offer.

Slow Reading in a Hurried Age is a practical guide for anyone who yearns for a more meaningful and satisfying reading experience, and who wants to sharpen reading skills and...

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?

Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontes, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry...

This two-volume catalogue is the first comprehensive scholarly description of the Western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, one of the finest collections in America. The rich holdings comprise more than 420 manuscripts in the Robert Garrett, Grenville Kane, Robert Taylor, Cotsen Library, and Princeton collections; manuscripts bound with incunables in the Rare Books Division; hundreds of single leaves and cuttings; and about 5,000 original documents in six other collections. The catalogue offers full textual, paleographic, codicological,...

100 Must-read Life-Changing Books by Nick Rennison

Novels which transform our ideas about human possibilities, biographies which celebrate the achievements of extraordinary individuals, polemical works of non-fiction which oblige us to alter our views of the world or of human society: all of us can remember reading at least one book which made us think about the world anew. Here, the author of the popular Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, selects the very best books which may or may not have changed the world, but which have certainly changed the lives of thousands of people who...