Descriere: Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah's Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media.Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a "literary experience" in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins's analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.
Autori: Jim Collins | Editura: Duke University Press | Anul aparitiei: 2010 | ISBN: 9780822346067 | Numar de pagini: 300 | Categorie: Literature
Gale Research Inc (Editor)
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism assembles critical responses to the works of 19th-century authors of all sortsâ "novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, philosophers, political leaders, scientists, mathematicians and writers from other genresâ "from every region of the world.Each of the more than 300 volumes in this long-standing series profiles approximately 3-6 novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, philosophers or other creative and nonfiction writers by providing full-text or excerpted criticism reproduced from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers and scholarly journals. Clear, accessible introductory essays followed by carefully selected critical responses allow end-users to engage with a variety of scholarly views and conversations about authors, works and literary topics. Introductory essays are written and entries compiled by professional literature researchers and other subject matter experts; many include an author portrait. A full citation and annotation precede each of the approximately 50 essays per volume. The series currently covers nearly 600 authors and also includes numerous entries focusing on literary topics and individual works. ...
Gale Research Inc (Editor)
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism assembles critical responses to the works of 19th-century authors of all sortsâ "novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, philosophers, political leaders, scientists, mathematicians and writers from other genresâ "from every region of the world.Each of the more than 300 volumes in this long-standing series profiles approximately 3-6 novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, philosophers or other creative and nonfiction writers by providing full-text or excerpted criticism reproduced from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers and scholarly journals. Clear, accessible introductory essays followed by carefully selected critical responses allow end-users to engage with a variety of scholarly views and conversations about authors, works and literary topics. Introductory essays are written and entries compiled by professional literature researchers and other subject matter experts; many include an author portrait. A full citation and annotation precede each of the approximately 50 essays per volume. The series currently covers nearly 600 authors and also includes numerous entries focusing on literary topics and individual works. ...
Gale Research Inc (Editor)
This highly useful series presents substantial excerpts from the best criticism on the major literary figures and nonfiction writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights and literary theorists, of 1900 to 1999 -- the era most frequently studied in high schools. Each volume presents overviews of four to eight authors with chronologically arranged criticism representing the entire range of response to each author. A typical excerpt is prefaced by an annotation that explains the critics reputation and critical philosophy and providing a synopsis of the excerpt. Approximately 90-95% of critical essays are full text. Every fourth volume is a Topics volume covering major literary movements, trends and other topics. Volumes include author, nationality, topic and title indexes; a cumulative title index to the entire series is published separately.