| Description |
1 online resource (326 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Introduction : at home in English -- Making it personal -- Literary history and the man who loved too much -- Wedded to books : nineteenth-century bookmen at home -- Going steady : canons' clockwork -- Canon love in gothic libraries -- Poetry at death's door |
| Summary |
Of the many charges laid against literary scholars, one of the most common - and perhaps the most wounding - is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they? That question led the author into the historical and cultural investigation of loving literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What the author discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life - that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or ahistorical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, this book nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase "the love of literature" as if its meaning were transparent, its essence happy and healthy. The author writes, "It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love's edginess and complexities." With this volume, the author aims to restore those edges and to revel in those complexities.--adapted from publisher's description |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Text in English |
|
Online resource; title from e-book title screen (EBL platform, viewed January 30, 2015) |
| Subject |
English literature -- Appreciation.
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English literature -- History and criticism.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
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English literature
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English literature -- Appreciation
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Literatur
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Englisch
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Achtung
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Engelsk litteratur -- historia.
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Engelsk litteratur -- mottagande.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780226183848 |
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022618384X |
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022618370X |
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9780226183701 |
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