The predominant readers of 18th century novels were young readers trying to find answers to the questions facing them.
Tag Archives: reading
Novel Readers: The Young & the Restless
The early novel appealed to the young, the ambitious, the mobile, and the urban.
Novels: Training Ground for Citizenship
Novels have an inherently liberal dimension in that they get us to identify with people very different from us.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged conservatism, liberalism, Lolita, Same Sex Marriage, Vladimir Nabokov Comments closed
Reading to Feel Accepted in a Strange Land
Last year, when the book discussion group that I moderate was participating in America’s Big Read program, I was referred to this essay written for the occasion by the Indian-American literary critic Parul Sehgal, an editor at The New York Times Book Review. I particularly like how she describes feeling accepted by books, even though she […]
Readers Hold the Key to a Book’s Meaning
Increasingly scholars are looking at what books do to us and what we do to books.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Anthony Trollope, reader response criticism, Small House at Allington Comments closed
High Art, Low Art, and Murakami
Murakami’s “1Q84” seamlessly moves between high art and pop culture, complicating the issue of guilty reading pleasures.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 1Q84, Haruki Murakami, high art, pop culture, postmodernism Comments closed
Depressed about Politics? Read Whitman
Marilynne Robinson turns to Whitman to argue that American Democracy’s greatness lies in how it honors the individual soul.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged America, Democracy, Leaves of Grass, Marilynne Robinson, politics, Walt Whitman, When I Was a Child I Read Books Comments closed
Can Poetry Be Bad for You?
The possibility that poetry can have a deleterious effect on one (the poetry of Scott and Byron anyway) is a possibility that Austen brings up in “Persuasion.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Soldier Rest", Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Persuasion, Sir Walter Scott, Wayne Booth Comments closed
