Download or read book Fiction And The Reading Public written by Literary Exors Of Q D Leavis and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-04-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction and the Reading Public provoked fierce controvers when first published in 1932, and it has since come to be recognised as a classic in its field. In her fascinating study, Q D Leavis investigates what has happened to the public taste in the last three centuries and what effect this has had on both the life of the nation and the equality of living for the individual. A brilliant piece of literary exegesis and an illuminating anthropological commentary - DAILY MAIL An illuminating study. . . it offers a rich store of interest, not only in its vigorous scrutiny of the novel and the influences which have shaped it, but also in its study of changing attitudes and tempos of life amont the general public who read novels. . . An achievement of distinguished quality and high value. New Republic. She has performed a noble office by inquiring into the case of the bestseller. The result is no less entertaining than instructive -SATURDAY REVIEW.
Download or read book In the Company of Books written by Sarah Wadsworth and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.
Download or read book The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales written by Bessie Head and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2013-10-09 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Bessie Head’s short stories have an extraordinary simplicity and breadth of vision,” heralded a review in The Tribune after publication of Head’s first collection of short stories, The Collector of Treasures. Regarded today as one of Africa’s best-known woman writers in English, Head draws on the rich oral tradition of southern Africa and masterfully applies storytelling’s language and imagery. Carefully sequenced, the anthology gives special focus to village people from independence-era Botswana and the status, position, and plight of African women.
Download or read book Fiction and the Reading Public written by Q. D. Leavis and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Library Book written by Susan Orlean and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.
Download or read book Fiction and the reading public written by Queenie D. Leavis and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fiction and the Reading Public written by Queenie Dorothy Leavis and published by . This book was released on 1932 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Satin Island written by Tom McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in. U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.
Download or read book Reading Fiction in Antebellum America written by James L. Machor and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time. Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.
Download or read book The Social Life of Books written by Abigail Williams and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post
Download or read book Bring on the Books for Everybody written by Jim Collins and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah’s Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a “literary experience” in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins’s analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.
Download or read book Fiction and the Reading Public written by Qd Leavis and published by Franklin Classics. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book A Fictive People written by Ronald J. Zboray and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text aims to explode two notions that are commonplace in American cultural histories of the 19th century: that the spread of literature was a simple force for the democratization of taste, and that there was a body of 19th-century literature that reflected "a nation of readers."
Download or read book The Talented Miss Highsmith written by Joan Schenkar and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-01-18 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt is now a major motion picture (Carol) starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska, directed by Todd Hayes A 2010 New York Times Notable Book A 2010 Lambda Literary Award Winner A 2009 Edgar Award Nominee A 2009 Agatha Award Nominee A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite "hero-criminal," the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. The Talented Miss Highsmith is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith's whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It's a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself.
Download or read book The Recognitions written by William Gaddis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most distinctive, accomplished novelists of the last century. The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a New England minister, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration. In expiation, he will paint nothing but flawless copies of his revered old masters—copies, however, that find their way into the hands of a sinister financial wizard by the name of Recktall Brown, who of course sells them as the real thing. Dismissed uncomprehendingly by reviewers on publication in 1955 and ignored by the literary world for decades after, The Recognitions is now established as one of the great American novels, immensely ambitious and entirely unique, a book of wild, Boschian inspiration and outrageous comedy that is also profoundly serious and sad.
Download or read book A Companion to American Literature written by Susan Belasco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-03 with total page 1864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.
Download or read book Public Works written by Christopher Grimes and published by F2c. This book was released on 2005 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The short fictions collected in Public Works explore the extremes of human nature and literary technique. From the manic, single-sentence fiction "Public Sentence" to the carefully structured and plot-twisting "We Stand Here, Swinging Cats," Grimes' stories have an idiosyncratic and associative quality-nothing follows predictably from anything, and beginnings never foreshadow ends. While reading, one has the sense that, despite recognizable voices and themes, this imagination seems alien, as though divvying up and parceling out the world by its own rules. In "Glue Trap," a one-legged shopkeeper offers expert instruction in the art of one-on-one combat with a rat. In "Making Love: a Translation," the stream of consciousness creates a fiction as simple as Hemingway, as wistful and dissociative as Julio Cortazar. Ultimately, Grimes' stories question the grids and schemas we impose on "reality." His is a formal defiance of the tyranny of traditional narrative, expressed with a thematic daring that moves between the contemplation of ordinary buckets and high art.
