Download or read book Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading written by Kevin R. West and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading explores how selected American and European literary texts, from the classic to the contemporary, represent reading as a dangerous endeavor. It investigates how the texts being read or the conditions of reading may produce danger and considers the various qualities of the dangers depicted: literal or metaphorical, real or imagined, minor or mortal. Whereas readers can readily imagine being depressed or bored by a book, or even perhaps corrupted in some moral fashion, readers typically assume that the mere words on a page cannot directly affect their health. Nevertheless, literature can and does stage readings in which readers suffer actual harm from the magical or supernatural qualities of a given text. Such impossibly dangerous reading fascinates, the author argues, by exaggerating the dangers that may inhabit certain real experiences of reading.
Download or read book The Dangerous Potential of Reading written by Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of a mass readership, a mass market for books, and a prominent status of reading and readers is reflected in the central role of literacy, reading, and books in the lives of protagonists in nineteenth-century American and French literature. In this book, Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau examines the destabilizing role of reading in the works of Frederick Douglass, Horatio Alger, Emile Zola, Louisa May Alcott, and Gustave Flaubert. This book-the first to study nineteenth-century protagonists across lines of nationality, class, and gender-demonstrates the empowering effects of reading for Douglass, Alger's Ragged Dick, Zola's Etienne, Alcott's Jo, and Flaubert's Emma.
Download or read book The Little Friend written by Donna Tartt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.
Download or read book The Most Dangerous Book written by Kevin Birmingham and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.
Download or read book Some Girls Are written by Courtney Summers and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic Courtney Summers with a brand new look and exclusive bonus material! This ebook edition of Some Girls Are includes updated text and a discussion guide. The only thing worse than being Anna Morrison's best friend is being her enemy—and Regina Afton is about to discover that the hard way. After she's set-up by a fellow member of their vicious, all-girl clique, Regina ends up on the receiving end of the same acts of cruelty she spent years committing and seeks solace in the unexpected company of Michael Hayden, a quiet loner she used to bully. As tensions grow and the abuse worsens, the two question whether a mean girl can ever truly be redeemed for her past, and if not, just how much should she be made to pay. As their feelings for each other grow more complicated and the final days of senior year march toward an explosive conclusion, they're terrified to find out . . . Also available from Courtney Summers: I'M THE GIRL, the new "brutally captivating" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) queer thriller based loosely on The Epstein case.
Download or read book Into the River written by Ted Dawe and published by Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping, gritty and award-winning coming-of-age novel for young adult readers. When Te Arepa Santos is dragged into the river by a giant eel, something happens that will change the course of his whole life. The boy who struggles to the bank is not the same one who plunged in, moments earlier. He has brushed against the spirit world, and there is a price to be paid; an utu (revenge) to be exacted. Years later, far from the protection of whanau (family) and ancestral land, he finds new enemies. This time, with no one to save him, there is a decision to be made: he can wait on the bank, or leap forward into the river. At the 2013 NZ Post Childrens Book Awards Into the River was judged the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year. It also won the Young Adult Fiction category of the awards. An engaging coming-of-age novel, it follows its main protagonist from his childhood in small-town rural New Zealand to an elite Auckland boarding school, where he must forge his own way – including battling with his cultural identity. This prequel to Ted Dawe's award-winning novel Thunder Road is gritty, provocative, at times shocking, but always real and true. The awards' chief judge Bernard Beckett described a character "caught between two worlds ... the explicit content was presented as the danger of people being left adrift by society. And within that context, hard-hitting material is crucial; it is what makes the book authentic, real and important." The Deputy Chief Censor of Fim and Literature ruled that the book is not offensive: 'The book deals with some stronger content. There are sexual relationships between teenagers, encounters with possible child sexual exploitation, the use of illegal drugs and other criminal activities, violent assault, and a moderate level of highly offensive language. These are well contextualised within an exciting fast moving narrative that has as its protagonist, a young teenage Maori boy from a rural community who is finding his way through the strange uncomfortable environment of a boys’ boarding school and unfamiliar social mores. The story captures the raw and real extremes of adolescence in teenage boys along with their yearnings and obsessions. The book is notable for being one of the first in the New Zealand which specifically targets teenage boys and younger men — a genre that does not have great representation. The genre character is therefore significant. The content immerses the reader in action, wit, and intrigue, as well as a level of social realism, all likely to engage teen and young adult readers and with particular appeal for older boys and young men.'
Download or read book Women s Divination in Biblical Literature written by Esther J. Hamori and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divination, the use of special talents and techniques to gain divine knowledge, was practiced in many different forms in ancient Israel and throughout the ancient world. The Hebrew Bible reveals a variety of traditions of women associated with divination. This sensitive and incisive book by respected scholar Esther J. Hamori examines the wide scope of women’s divinatory activities as portrayed in the Hebrew texts, offering readers a new appreciation of the surprising breadth of women’s “arts of knowledge” in biblical times. Unlike earlier approaches to the subject that have viewed prophecy separately from other forms of divination, Hamori’s study encompasses the full range of divinatory practices and the personages who performed them, from the female prophets and the medium of En-dor to the matriarch who interprets a birth omen and the “wise women” of Tekoa and Abel and more. In doing so, the author brings into clearer focus the complex, rich, and diverse world of ancient Israelite divination.
Download or read book Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Galia Ofek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galia Ofek's wide-ranging study elucidates the historical, artistic, literary, and theoretical meanings of the Victorians' preoccupation with hair. Victorian writers and artists, Ofek argues, had a well-developed awareness of fetishism as an overinvestment of value in a specific body part and were fully cognizant of hair's symbolic resonance and its value as an object of commerce. In particular, they were increasingly alert to the symbolic significance of hairstyling. Among the writers and artists Ofek considers are Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Herbert Spencer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Aubrey Beardsley. By examining fiction, poetry, anthropological and scientific works, newspaper reviews and advertisements, correspondence, jewellery, paintings, and cartoons, Ofek shows how changing patterns of power relations between women and patriarchy are rendered anew when viewed through the lens of Victorian hair codes and imagery during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book A Little Life written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.
Download or read book Handbook of Research on Children s and Young Adult Literature written by Shelby Wolf and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multidisciplinary handbook pulls together in one volume the research on children's and young adult literature which is currently scattered across three intersecting disciplines: education, English, and library and information science.
Download or read book The Bad Side of Books written by D.H. Lawrence and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.
Download or read book Human Interaction with the Natural World in Wisdom Literature and Beyond written by Mordechai Cogan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-04 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Created in honor of the work of Professor Tova Forti, this collection considers the natural world in key wisdom books - Proverbs, Job and Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes, Ben Sira and Song of Songs/Solomon - and also examines particular animal and plant imagery in other texts in the Hebrew Bible. It crucially involves ancient Near Eastern parallels and like texts from the classical world, but also draws on rabbinic tradition and broader interpretative works, as well as different textual traditions such as the LXX and Qumran scrolls. Whilst the natural world, notably plants and animals, is a key uniting element, the human aspect is also crucial. To explore this, contributors also treat the wider concerns within wisdom literature on human beings in relation to their social context, and in comparison with neighbouring nations. They emphasize that the human, animal and plant worlds act together in synthesis, all enhanced and imbued by the world-view of wisdom literature.
Download or read book A New History of French Literature written by Denis Hollier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-19 with total page 1202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book’s resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks. No article is limited to the “life and works” of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922. Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.
Download or read book Creativity and Children s Literature written by Marianne Saccardi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's students need to be able to do more than score well on teststhey must be creative thinkers and problem solvers. The tools in this book will help teachers and parents start students on the path to becoming innovative, successful individuals in the 21st century workforce. The children in classrooms today will soon become adult members of society: they will need to apply divergent thinking skills to be effective in all aspects of their lives, regardless of their specific occupation. How well your students meet complicated challenges and take advantage of the opportunities before them decades down the road will depend largely upon the kind of thinking they are trained and encouraged to do today. This book provides a game plan for busy librarians and teachers to develop their students' abilities to arrive at new ideas by utilizing children's books at hand. Following an introduction in which the author defines divergent thinking, discusses its characteristics, and establishes its vital importance, chapters dedicated to types of literature for children such as fantasy, poetry, and non-fiction present specific titles and relevant activities geared to fostering divergent thinking in young minds. Parents will find the recommendations of the kinds of books to read with their children and explanations of how to engage their children in conversations that will help their creative thinking skills extremely beneficial. The book also includes a case study of a fourth-grade class that applied the principles of divergent thinking to imagine innovative designs and come up with new ideas while studying a social studies/science unit on ecology.
Download or read book Dystopian Depictions of Serbia in British Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-03 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without any doubt, one of the European regions that has never ceased to trouble the Westerner traveller is the Balkan Peninsula, which functioned as a terra incognita within the British travel canon, and served as the transit point to the Ottoman Empire or the Old Grecian world. At a time when Anglo-Saxonism occupied a prevalent position in British political discourse, the Balkan Peninsula came to epitomise all the negative qualities of the Orient that British travellers were anxious to apply to alien countries that were far removed from the nation-building agenda of the Empire. As such, classified as the fringe of the Orient, Serbia was persistently depicted as a politically unstable region, inhabited by primitive ethnic groups that could possibly threaten the viability of the British imperialist interests in European Turkey. In the light of the Serbian national struggle to promote the idea of a South-Slavic Union or forge an identity against the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, some British travellers undertook a journey to all the Balkan states where Serbians formed the majority of the population to demonise the War of Liberation of the Balkan states against the Ottoman yoke, treating it as visible evidence of Russian Expansionism. This book concentrates on dystopian British imagology of Serbia as a travel destination, including travel accounts produced from 1717 until 1911, a year prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The travel texts incorporated into this volume shed light on all the conceptualisations of the Balkans, addressing the sociopolitical conditions that sparked the national awakening of Serbia.
Download or read book Forbidden Knowledge written by Roger Shattuck and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1997 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting account of the ways in which man's darkest impulses conflict with common sense. From the lessons learned in "Paradise Lost" and the events which transpired in the tales of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "Frankenstein" to unlocking the secrets of the atom, Shattuck's brilliant synthesis of history and literature is utterly relevant to our times and addictively readable.
Download or read book Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English written by Om Prakash Dwivedi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this book by established and emerging international scholars. Drawing their arguments from literary works rooted in the neoliberal period, the chapters show how the extractive ideology of neoliberalism invades the cultural, political, economic, and social spheres of postcolonial South Asia. The book explores different forms of “precarity” to investigate the vulnerable and insecure life conditions embodied in the everyday life of South Asia, enabling the reader to see through the rhetoric of “rising Asia”.
