Edited by Scott E. Casper (NHC Fellow, 2005–06), Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship Volume 3 of A History of the Book in America narrates the emergence of a national book trade in the nineteenth century, as changes in manufacturing, distribution, and publishing conditioned, and were conditioned by, the evolving practices of authors and … Continued
By J. Paul Hunter (NHC Fellow, 1985–86; 1995–96) What did people read before there were novels? Not necessarily just other “literary” works, according to this fascinating study of the beginnings of the English novel. To understand the origins of the novel as a species and to read individual novels well, we must know several pasts and traditions―even … Continued
By Peter T. Struck (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the … Continued
By N. Katherine Hayles (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with Electronic Literature by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an … Continued
By John N. King (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) This book was first published in 2006. Second only to the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, known as the Book of Martyrs, was the most influential book published in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most complex and best-illustrated English … Continued
Edited by Matthew Rubery (NHC Fellow, 2018–19) and Leah Price What does reading mean in the twenty-first century? As other disciplines challenge literary criticism’s authority to answer this question, English professors are defining new alternatives to close reading and to interpretation more generally. Further Reading brings together thirty essays drawing on approaches as different as formalism, historicism, … Continued
By Annabel Patterson (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) For those exhausted by the highly charged debates and polarized climate of literary studies today, Annabel Patterson’s Reading Between the Lines offers a strategic compromise: a moderate stance between the radical opponents and the zealous protectors of the traditional Western canon. She reconsiders the value of reading the white, male, canonical … Continued
By Andrew H. Miller (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its … Continued
By Derek Attridge (NHC Fellow 2014–15; 2016–17) Was the experience of poetry–or a cultural practice we now call poetry–continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson's Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616? How did the pleasure afforded by the crafting of language into memorable … Continued
By Denis Donoghue (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1991–92; 1995–96; 1997–1998) This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails … Continued