Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest--a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works, including symbols, themes, and contexts--teaches you how to make your everyday reading experience richer and more rewarding.

While books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings beneath the surface. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the practiced analytical eye--and the literary codes--of a college professor.

What does it mean when a protagonist is traveling along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Thomas C. Foster provides answers to these questions as he explores every aspect of fiction, from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form. Offering a broad overview of literature--a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower--he shows us how to make our reading experience more intellectually satisfying and fun.

The world, and curricula, have changed. This third edition has been thoroughly revised to reflect those changes, and features new chapters, a new preface and epilogue, as well as fresh teaching points Foster has developed over the past decade. Foster updates the books he discusses to include more diverse, inclusive, and modern works, such as Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give; Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven; Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere; Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X; Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird; Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street; Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet; Madeline Miller's Circe; Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls; and Tahereh Mafi's A Very Large Expanse of Sea.

Discover the hauntingly beautiful tale of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Immerse yourself in the dark and passionate world of the Earnshaw and Linton families, as love, revenge, and the supernatural intertwine to create a literary masterpiece that continues to captivate readers.

• Emily Brontë's iconic Gothic novel
• A tale of love, passion, and vengeance on the Yorkshire moors
• Richly developed characters with complex relationships
• Atmospheric and evocative writing style
• A timeless classic that explores the depths of human emotions.

A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

PROSE AWARDS MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES FINALIST 2024

The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present - and draws out lessons for the age to come.

The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture - a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass - mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on - that came to dominate the public sphere.

What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today's debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis' exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.

The giant of literary theory analyses the novel: Conrad, James, Atwood, Oe, Mailer, Grass, Grossman, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Knausgaard and more

A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation, and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living.

The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try - and sometimes succeed - in awakening our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience; opening up a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and class or community. But even if this happens (rarely!), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the mere awakening of a feeling of multitude.

And, since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, it is urgent to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these nationalisms.

This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politicality of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the old Soviet Union; from East Germany to Japan, Latin America and the Nordic countries. Like any such voyage, it is an arbitrary movement across the world of historical situations which, however, seeks to dramatize their common kinship in late capitalism itself.

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling.

But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose.

Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years.

This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

Discover Virginia Woolf's landmark essay on women's struggle for independence and creative opportunity

A Room of One's Own is one of Virginia Woolf's most influential works and widely recognized for its extraordinary contribution to the women's movement. Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, it is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister, and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. The work was ranked by The Guardian newspaper as number 45 in the 100 World's Best Non-fiction Books. Part of the bestselling Capstone series, this collectible, hard-back edition of A Room of One's Own includes an insightful introduction by Jessica Gildersleeve that explains the book's place in modernist literature and why it still resonates with contemporary readers.

Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf was one of the most forward-thinking English writers of her time. Author of the classic novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies, and a member of the celebrated Bloomsbury Set of intellectuals and artists.

• Discover why A Room of One's Own is considered among the greatest and most influential works of female empowerment and creativity
• Learn why Woolf's classic has stood the test of time. Make this attractive, high-quality hardcover edition a permanent addition to your library
• Enjoy an insightful introduction by Jessica Gildersleeve, who connects the themes of the text to the concerns of today's audience

Capstone Classics brings A Room of One's Own to a new generation of readers who can discover how Woolf's book broke new artistic ground and advanced the position of women writers and creatives around the world.

The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature

More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature.

A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how, from antiquity to modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism.

This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.

Jamil Elabed, the author of this 8^thGolden Copy edition of the translation into Arabic of Khalil Gibran'sThe Prophet, spent twenty years and eight editions refining this work.

The Arabic language is his greatest passion. As a graduate of English Language and Literature, his English language skills helped him translate one of the greatest books in history into Gibran's mother tongue, a book that has sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than a hundred languages.

Jamil revelled in the company of Gibran's visions and thoughts over the years, hence his relentless refinement to bring this Golden Copy to as close to perfection and thorough faithfulness to the original text as he possibly could. This obsession was driven by his primary purpose of providing Arabic readers with the same pleasure that readers of the original English text bask in.

This herculean linguistic challenge Jamil undertook changed his life in so many ways. The vagueness of being was no longer as vague; we are no longer more body than spirit; what is here is not all that is there.

The Prophet is a long poem that we all crave to sing. A song the translator sang with Gibran, albeit in Arabic this time. The Arabic words and phrases came from the same reservoir and transcendental echoes as their English counterparts; from the same mysterious caves, bearing the same breath and the same rhythm. However, the translator leaned heavily on the grandeur and the inherent vigorousness and tunefulness of the Arabic language that sent its words fluttering like robins in flight, and the phrases streaming like a brook in a melody of image and sound, reflecting those which Gibran saw and heard in his short but enormously bountiful and inspiring life.

From Homer's epics to mainstream news, stories have lives of their own--and humans may not always control the narratives we create

Combining ancient epic and myth with analogies from biology and the natural world, Joel P. Christensen explores the creative process and how narratives develop. This bold work urges readers to treat narratives as living things with their own agency in the world. Christensen starts by using Homeric epic to explore the way language and meaning develop alongside audiences in complex ecosystems and then moves through storytelling in the ancient Mediterranean over a thousand years. In this study, which ranges from the evolution of narratives to viral ideas, and to the dangerous side of stories in mass shootings and war, we see how narratives function as independent entities with consequences that cause lasting harm.

Connecting his argument to the present day, Christensen addresses contemporary cultural panics, including AI and ChatGPT, post-truth or alt-facts in the digital age, and free speech and cancel culture. Storylife invites readers to rethink human creativity, the importance of collective actions, and the lives we build together with and against narrative. In an age rife with misinformation, it is time to reconsider how much control we have over stories and how to educate ourselves once we acknowledge the power that narrative exerts over us.

Trolling began long before the internet. This accessible history traces the ancestry of its textual and rhetorical strategies, by looking at literature from ancient Greece to the 1980s.

Trolling is the most controversial genre of writing to have risen to prominence in the 21st century, with far-reaching consequences for its writers and readers alike. But it is too often regarded as a technological problem, confined to the internet. This book takes a very different approach: it regards trolling as a cultural problem with a long and venerable literary history.

Taking in the contrarianism of Lord Byron, the wit of Oscar Wilde, insult trading in Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift's disaster trolling, Martin Luther's dissemination of heresy through a public discussion forum, the grotesquely misogynistic abuse hurled in Archilochus's poetry, the taunting provocations of avant-garde manifestos, and not forgetting public humiliations in Beowulf, David Rudrum demonstrates that trolls' rhetorical shenanigans are neither new nor unvanquishable.

At a time when many Americans . . . are engaged in deep reflection about the meaning of the nation's history [this] is an exceptionally useful companion for those who want to do so with honesty and integrity. --Shelf Awareness

From the author of How to Think and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a literary guide to engaging with the voices of the past to stay sane in the present

W. H. Auden once wrote that art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present--and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our personal density.

Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought--plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs's answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know.

What can Homer teach us about force? How does Frederick Douglass deal with the massive blind spots of America's Founding Fathers? And what can we learn from modern authors who engage passionately and profoundly with the past? How can Ursula K. Le Guin show us truths about Virgil's female characters that Virgil himself could never have seen? In Breaking Bread with the Dead, a gifted scholar draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with texts from across the ages, including the work of Anita Desai, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Rhys, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Amitav Ghosh, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Italo Calvino, and many more.

By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.

A study of how Kazuo Ishiguro's novels respond to and represent the world through characters that are profoundly limited in their understanding of the systems that bind them.

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them.

By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited.

Revealing the rich inner life of a literary genius, this large collection of Austen's correspondence offers a unique and intimate glimpse into her daily life, relationships, and creative process.

Although on the surface a series of discussions about silk stockings, dinner menus and attending dances, and other trivial matters, these letters offer the reader unique insights in the life and mind of this great author.

Through her witty, insightful, and often poignant letters, readers gain a deeper understanding of the woman behind the beloved novels, her thoughts on society, and her experiences in Regency-era England.

The Letters of Jane Austen is not to be missed by those who have read and enjoyed her works and especially those wishing to learn something about the life Jane Austen led on a day-to-day basis.

A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

PROSE AWARDS MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES FINALIST 2024

The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present - and draws out lessons for the age to come.

The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture - a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass - mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on - that came to dominate the public sphere.

What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today's debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis' exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.

An examination of Spanglish, Portuñol, and Judeo-Spanish literatures that builds on sociolinguistic understandings of the intersections of language, nation, and identity to develop the theoretical frameworks of linguistic labor and literary doulas.

Connecting the metaphor of labor to the human life cycle, Remy Attig introduces the notion of literary doulas. These doulas accompany a community as a body of literature is born (akin to the doula as midwife), or, in the case of Judeo-Spanish, writes the language as a form of linguistic palliative care for a community whose historical language is facing imminent death (the death doula).

Presenting three case studies of Spanglish, Portuñol, and Judeo-Spanish, the first part of Linguistic Labor and Literary Doulas places the emergence of these languages in their respective geographies and contexts. Attig discusses the work of authors and literary doulas, including Susana Chávez-Silverman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Fabián Severo, and Matilda Koén-Sarano.

The framework of linguistic labor relates the creation of a literary corpus in an undervalued or stigmatized language context to other forms of domestic or gendered labor, often the responsibility of women and queer people. In the second part of the book, Attig places these literatures and theories in discussion with emerging scholarship in translinguistics, queer theories, and translation studies. By applying the notion of translinguistics to useful case studies that challenge traditional understandings of the frontiers between languages, Linguistic Labor and Literary Doulas models productive ways that we can discuss real-world linguistic practices as valuable aspects of culture and identity.

Moby-Dick as Philosophy is at base a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Herman Melville's masterwork, Moby-Dick. The commentary form of the book subserves a higher end, the presentation of an ideal of the type philosopher. Superimposing portraits of Plato, Melville, and Nietzsche--the thinkers themselves, their ideas and their lives--it generates a composite image from the overlaying and interblending of figures. At a higher level still, the book is a meditation on the nature of philosophy and its relation to wisdom, and the relation of creative artistry to both. It explores these themes in the context of the history of philosophy conceived as the rise and fall of a certain influential variety of Platonism--in Nietzschean terms, the life and death of God--and it proceeds with reference to the different reactions, as exemplified particularly by Melville and Nietzsche, to the nihilism that looms on the horizon of these intellectual and spiritual revolutions.

Orphaned with a substantial inheritance at the age of ten, Pauline Quenu is taken from Paris to live with her relatives, Monsieur and Madame Chanteau and their son Lazare, in the village of Bonneville on the wild Normandy coast. Her presence enlivens the household and Pauline is the only one who can ease Chanteau's gout-ridden agony. Her love of life contrasts with the insularity and pessimism that infects the family, especially Lazare, for whom she develops a devoted passion. Gradually, Madame Chanteau starts to take advantage of Pauline's generous nature, and jealousy and resentment threaten to blight all their lives. The arrival of a pretty family friend, Louise, brings tensions to a head.

The twelfth novel in the Rougon Macquart series, The Bright Side of Life is remarkable for its depiction of intense emotions and physical and mental suffering. The precarious location of Bonneville and the changing moods of the sea mirror the turbulent relations of the characters, and as the story unfolds its title comes to seem ever more ironic.

For many decades Peter Brooks's critical writing has been a force of illumination and inspiration for readers of many kinds, with memorable books that continue to generate new thinking. Reading for the Plot was perhaps the best known of these until Brooks published Seduced by Story (2022), a provocative calling out of the now ubiquitous cultural stress on 'stories' of all and any kind.

The mini-essays in this volume build on the diverse strands of Brooks's work in their own ways, to demonstrate -and celebrate--its significance for critical thinking across a range of different disciplinary fields and institutional settings: in literary history and narrative theory; in psychoanalytic and legal studies; through interdisciplinary initiatives at Yale. There are also two longer essays by Peter Brooks himself, including one on his experience of prison teaching.

A first-ever English translation of a compelling work by a forerunner of modern Sephardi feminist literature.

Raised in the Judería or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the 20th-century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to José, an uncouth man from her own community who has returned from Argentina to take a wife. Mazaltob, however, is in love with Jean, who is French, half-Jewish, and a free spirit. In this classic of North African Jewish fiction, Blanche Bendahan evokes the two compelling forces tearing Mazaltob apart in her body and soul: her loyalty to the Judería and her powerful desire to follow her own voice and find true love. Bendahan's nuanced and moving novel is a masterly exploration of the language, religion, and quotidian customs constraining North African Jewish women on the cusp of emancipation and decolonization. Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino provide the first English translation of this modern coming-of-age tale, awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1930, and analyze the ways in which Mazaltob, with its disconcerting blend of ethnographic details and modernist experimentation, is the first of its genre--that of the feminist Sephardi novel. A historical introduction, a literary analysis, and annotations elucidate historical and cultural terms for readers, supplementing the author's original notes.

An engaging analysis of the catastrophic ways capital perverts market dynamics by a leading scholar of Deleuze.

Perversions of the Market argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism-not as individual psychological proclivities but as widespread institutionalized patterns of behavior. The book is divided into two parts: one historical and the other theoretical. In the first, Eugene W. Holland shows how, as capital becomes global in scale and drives production and consumption farther and farther apart, it perverts otherwise free markets, transforming sadism and masochism into borderline conditions and various supremacisms. The second part then turns to Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, explaining how it helpfully embeds Freud's analysis of the family and Lacan's analysis of language within an analysis of the capitalist market and its psycho-dynamics. Drawing on literature and film throughout to illuminate the discontents of modern culture, Holland maintains that the sadistic relations of production and masochistic relations of consumption must be eliminated to prevent capitalism from destroying life as we know it.