Literary studies: general

This is a celebration of the love for books, with contributions from writers and academics, including Margaret Drabble, John Bayley and Alan Sillitoe. It is a timely intervention in the debate about the future of books in the electronic age.

Few of us consider the order of the alphabet for long after we first learn it as children. Yet it is alphabetic order, its role in organization, that allows us to access centuries of thought, of knowledge, of poetry, literature, scientific discovery and discourse. Alphabetical order allows us to ...

Most of what we say about books is really about their contents: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen th...

Most of what we say about books is really about their contents: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen th...

How can a Victorian poem help teenagers understand YouTube misogyny? Can Jane Eyre encourage us to speak out? What can Lady Macbeth teach us about empathy? Should our expectations for our future be any greater than Pip's? And why is it so important to make space for these conversations in the fir...

In this exhilarating book, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling, and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society.

Fintan O'Toole's take on Shakespeare challenges traditional approaches to the playwright. The author shows how his works have been made unintelligible by the filtering process of some who have no idea of what Shakespeare truly meant.

Love sonnets are for romantics, starry-eyed lovers and ardent hearts. And Shakespeare's sonnets are the best ever written. But this is why they are also for cynics, for star-crossed lovers and for those who know the anguish of unrequited love. Some appear to be written to a young man, some to a w...

This is a study of the stranger, both as a deep personal sense of self as distinct from that being known to outsiders, and as the foreigner, an alien in a different country or society not his or her own. The work covers the fields of literature and philosophy - from Greek tragedy and the Bible, t...