Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

"I have been a character in academic fiction at least twice," Elaine Showalter writes, "once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too easily identified in either of these guises . . . although I can tell you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role as the withered prune."

In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think,...

Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, "The Holodeck in the Garden" offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American literature.

Contributors include Michael Berube writing on Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist"; Joseph Conte on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; David Cowart on Don DeLillo's "Cosmopolis"; Carl Djerassi on science-in-fiction; N. Katherine Hayles on Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"; Ursula Heise on risk and narrative in the contemporary novel; John...

The third in the Now Read This series, Pearl & Cords's guide briefly describes and organizes approximately 500 of the most popular and current contemporary, mainstream fiction titles according to their primary appeal features-character, setting, language, and story. It also notes award-winning titles and those appropriate for book clubs; and it offers users suggestions for related reads. Focus is on titles published since 2000, and all annotations are new to this volume. This is "the" standard readers' advisory guide to mainstream fiction, and an essential tool for readers' advisors.

This work seeks to chart what happens in the embodied minds of engaged readers when they read literature. Despite the recent stylistic, linguistic, and cognitive advances that have been made in text-processing methodology and practice, very little is known about this cultural-cognitive process and especially about the role that emotion plays. Burke's theoretical and empirical study focuses on three central issues: the role emotions play in a core cognitive event like literary text processing; the kinds of bottom-up and top-down inputs most prominently involved in the literary reading...

Women writers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy reinvigorated the modern epistolary novel through their re-fashioning of the genre as a tool for examining women's roles and experiences. Addressing the Letter argues that many epistolary novels purposely tie narrative structure to thematic content, creating in the process powerful texts that reflect and challenge literary and socio-cultural norms.

Through the lens of the genre, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and...