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This volume is illustrated with manuscripts, printed objects, and art works. It tells a 5000-year history of writing and books, giving readers an account of why books matter and how they impact our lives.
Examines the violence, destruction, and suppression that have hounded books throughout their history and the fears that lead to such treachery. This book identifies three deeply seated fears: fear of insurrection, fear of blasphemy, and fear of pornography.
Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.
This is a study of the rise and activity of the London publishing house which started in 1829 as Bentley and Colburn and was finally absorbed by Macmillan in 1898. Professor Gettmann has worked from the surviving papers of the firm and it is probable that he has here given more detail about the aims, methods and successes of an English publisher of the time than can be found anywhere else. Since there is constant reference from the activities of Bentley to that of his contemporaries, it is also a microcosm of English authorship and publishing from the time of Scott to that of Meredith: one of the great period of English publishing enterprise. It discusses movements of taste and cycles of popular reading and illustrates the relationship between publisher and author. It also deals with authors' contracts and rewards and in short, deals with every aspect of English publishing in an important period.
There is nothing to fear but fear itself... Twenty six original tales of horror by established masters of terror and talented new voices lie within this Lexicon of Fear. Beware the dark power of words in BIBLIOPHOBIA...a carnival double act made in Hell can be found in the clown cemetery in COULROPHOBIA...an artist loses his power to create ice sculptures because of his fear of cold in FRIGOPHOBIA, but that is the least of his problems as his therapist suffers the same phobia... The fear of open spaces manifests itself in KENOPHOBIA, a tale of the ultimate emptiness - the Great Void that awaits us all...the fear of beautiful women is fully justified in VENUSTROPHOBIA, a tale of futile defence against the Succubus... ...but beware: the cure may be worse... Denying yourself a place in Heaven is one way to avoid JESUSPHOBIA, but the only alternative means Hell to pay...a playwright fights his fear of the colour yellow by creating an unusual addition to his Dramatis Personae in XANTHOPHOBIA...a Witchfinder's fear of open water will only be relieved by imbibing one of two deathly fluids in AQUAPHOBIA...and a widower follows the age-old advice of turning to face your fear in QIQIRN, only to uncover the true nature of an Inuit dog spirit that carries the essence of cold terror from its ancient homeland into the realm of human grief... Open the pages. It is time to learn your A to Dread...
The ten essays in this volume all deal with various aspects of the interpretation of the Book of Kings. Bob Becking tries to set a course between Scylla and Charibdis. Both 'minimalism' and 'maximalism' are avoided by trying to apply a variety of methods: narratology, historical criticism and theological analysis. This implies that extra-biblical evidence -- the Tell Dan inscription, Assyrian royal inscriptions, West Semitic seal inscriptions -- are taken into account. Selected texts from this biblical book are read on the basis of a three-dimensional matrix: (1) the narrative character of the story/stories; (2) the value and function of extra-biblical material, be it of an epigraphical or an archaeological character; (3) the art of history-writing both ancient and modern. The essays are arranged according to the order in which the relevant texts or their main characters figure in the Book of Kings. Originally published between 1987 and 2005, they have been updated for publication in the present collection.
This book, first published in 1986, contains a collection of remarkable essays analysing such topics as the nature of reading, the power of books, literary creation, libraries and technology, and the freedom to read.
Inspects the allure of books, their curative and restorative properties, and the passion for them that leads to bibliomania. This title comments on why we read, where we read - on journeys, at mealtimes, on the toilet (this has 'a long but mostly unrecorded history'), in bed, and in prison - and what happens to us when we read.
