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Deidre Shauna Lynch - Loving Literature: A Cultural History - 9780226183701 - V9780226183701
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Loving Literature: A Cultural History

€ 126.37
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Description for Loving Literature: A Cultural History Hardcover. 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. Num Pages: 352 pages, 13 halftones. BIC Classification: DSB; HBTB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 239 x 162 x 26. Weight in Grams: 594.
Of the many charges laid against contemporary 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, actually 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 Deidre Shauna Lynch 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 Lynch 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 a historical 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 behind our warm relationship to books, Loving Literature 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. Lynch 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 masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges, and allows us to revel in those complexities.

Product Details

Publisher
University Of Chicago Press
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2015
Condition
New
Weight
593g
Number of Pages
352
Place of Publication
, United States
ISBN
9780226183701
SKU
V9780226183701
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Deidre Shauna Lynch
Deidre Shauna Lynch is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto and the author of The Economy of Character; Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Meaning, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews for Loving Literature: A Cultural History
"A major work by a major scholar. This is truly an eagerly awaited book. Needless to say, Lynch writes not as some kind of skeptical outsider, but as a 'lover of literature' who seeks to understand why we professionally take all this so personally. The book will be much read and talked about across all fields of literary scholarship and beyond: a book about the love of literature is sure to attract the attention of a broad band of literature lovers both inside and outside the academy." (Adela Pinch, University of Michigan)"

Goodreads reviews for Loving Literature: A Cultural History


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