Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

It is easy to forget in our own day of cheap paperbacks and mega-bookstores that, until very recently, books were luxury items. Those who could not afford to buy had to borrow, share, obtain secondhand, inherit, or listen to others reading. This book examines how people acquired and read books from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the personal relationships between readers and the volumes they owned. Margaret Willes considers a selection of private and public libraries across the period--most of which have survived--showing the diversity of book owners and borrowers, from...

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called "the Casanova of reading," argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. "We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything," writes Manguel, "landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create." Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on 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...