Readers respond to a piece by Zoe Williams in which she reflects on reading smut and notes how attitudes have changedIn her article on reading smut, Zoe Williams focuses on the difference between romance and erotica (My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled - and I soon found out why, 6 August. To my mind, that misses the point. For me, it is about the difference between “good” smut and … well, just smut.I am a 54-year-old Cambridge English literature graduate and I feel I have only just “discovered” smut when reading Sarah J Maas’s wonderful Acotar (A Court of Thorns and Roses) series earlier this year (by the way, those are the SJM books Williams should have chosen for her article, not the young adult Throne of Glass series, which has very little sex, in light of their intended audience). Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2024-08-09 16:55:05 UTC ]
‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ is one of dozens of famous expressions that have entered common speech, but which originated in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The old quip about Hamlet, that it’s ‘too full of quotations’, wittily sums up the play’s influence on not just English literature but on the... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2021-06-24 17:00:06 UTC ]
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It turns out 12th-century British scholars (monks, really, we’re mainly talking monks, here) had absolutely no problem borrowing “long passages” from whatever manuscripts they could get their hands on, and would freely plagiarize the writings of continental scholars. Of course, plagiarism then... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-05-11 14:10:25 UTC ]
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Readers respond to a Guardian editorial on the power of picture books to fire adult imaginations as much as children’sWith reference to your editorial on the picture book (The Guardian view on the picture book: not just for children, 19 March), how have we managed, given the evolving economics... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-03-26 16:31:22 UTC ]
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When compared with the sonnet, ballad, or even the villanelle, the pantoum verse form could hardly be called ‘popular’, and examples of pantoums in English literature are not exactly plentiful. Nonetheless, there are some fine instances of the pantoum – a distinctive and strict form which has... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2021-03-25 15:00:19 UTC ]
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New issue, dedicated to work by current and former prisoners, provokes uproar after it emerges one poet has served time for child pornography offencesThe US’s prestigious Poetry magazine has doubled down on its decision to publish a poem by a convicted sex offender as part of a special edition... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-02-03 16:08:52 UTC ]
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My assignment was to offer a survey course on the history of English literature in northeast China. I was paired with a young American teacher sponsored by the United Nations who was to teach phonetics and oral expression. We taught six days a week, and every Wednesday afternoon our students... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-01-15 09:49:40 UTC ]
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Lit in Colour, the publisher’s partnership with the Runnymede Trust, hopes to redress imbalances in English literature coursesThe book publisher Penguin Random House has teamed up with the thinktank the Runnymede Trust to boost diversity in reading lists in schools.The partnership – Lit in... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-10-24 16:11:09 UTC ]
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Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle English literature has a rich tradition of comic writing. From Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ to Shakespeare’s Falstaff to the early comic novels of Smollett, Sterne, Fielding, and Swift, there are plenty of laughs to be had from the pages of the literary greats. But what... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-10-08 14:00:57 UTC ]
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BORN AND RAISED in Montenegro, Olja Knežević studied English literature at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, before completing her MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2008. Now living in Croatia, she is one of those effortlessly international authors whose... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-02 12:30:19 UTC ]
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Interviews Randy Ribay was born in the Philippines and raised in the Midwest. He’s the author of After the Shot Drops and An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes. His latest book, Patron Saints of Nothing, is a powerful coming-of-age story about... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-09-29 13:14:12 UTC ]
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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys the comic verse by one of the most ‘miserable’ poets in English literature ‘The Crocodile or, Public Decency’ is not one of the best-known poems of A. E. Housman (1859-1936), the classical scholar and poet who failed his […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-09-18 14:00:40 UTC ]
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Veteran biographer A.N. Wilson takes on one of the most popular, prolific and puzzling writers in English literature in "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-08-06 14:00:54 UTC ]
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After finding an anthology of English literature in the rubble of the Islamic University of Gaza during the 2014 Israeli bombing, Mosab Abu Toha had a dream: founding an English language library in one of the most confined, crowded, and isolated places in the world. According to the “We Are Not... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-07-22 08:47:29 UTC ]
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Traditionally, a ballad was a song that was designed to be danced to, as the etymology of the word, Provençal balada meaning ‘dance, song to dance to’, ultimately from late Latin ballare. The great British ballads – and we say ‘British’ because many of them were Scottish rather than English... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-06-14 14:00:45 UTC ]
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How many times have you heard someone say, ‘I don’t read poetry. I just don’t get it.’ Or perhaps, ‘Why can’t poets just come out and say what they want to say? Why say something in such a way?’ For many people, poetry is ‘difficult’. But whilst it’s true that […] The post 10 of the Most... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-05-30 14:00:36 UTC ]
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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines a famous phrase derived from Shakespeare The old line about Hamlet, that it’s ‘too full of quotations’, wittily sums up the play’s influence on not just English literature but on the everyday language we use. Many of us... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-05-29 14:00:47 UTC ]
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Guest Blogger: Prof Katy Shaw, University of Northumbria, Vice-Chair of BACLS – the British Association of Literary Studies – and executive committee member of University English, the national subject association. In recent years there has been a rapid rise in the teaching of English Literature... Continue reading at British Council global
[ British Council global | 2020-05-18 09:30:54 UTC ]
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Jeremy Trafford, who has died aged 85 after contracting Covid-19, was a publisher, teacher and writer. I met him in the late 1970s, while supply teaching at the London Oratory school, in west London, where he taught English literature in the sixth form. He was a brilliant teacher, who inspired... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-05-05 11:07:04 UTC ]
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When we think of poems, these days most people probably automatically think of lyric poems: usually quite short poems which describe the poet’s (or an imagined speaker’s) thoughts and feelings. But from the epic poems of Homer to the Border Ballads of the Middle Ages to notable contemporary... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-04-29 14:00:40 UTC ]
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Literary criticism (or even ‘literary theory’) goes back as far as ancient Greece, and Aristotle’s Poetics. But the rise of English Literature as a university subject, at the beginning of the twentieth century, led to literary criticism focusing on English literature – everything from... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-04-15 14:00:07 UTC ]
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