Literary Criticism

bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

“The World Within”: Introduction

  The World Within: Fiction Illuminating Neuroses of Our Time Edited by Mary Louise Aswell Notes and Introduction by Frederic Wertham, M.D. New York: Whittlesey House, 1947   The World Within was one of the first literary collections assembled to spotlight a psychological approach to literature. It couples a literary editor’s introductory remarks with analysis […]

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Monday Miscellany

The Conclusion of Women’s History Month As Women’s History month ends, here are two commemorative lists: 14 Totally Badass Female Authors Though many truly badass women authors are alive and working today, their stories aren’t yet finished. So as Women’s History Month draws to a close, we wanted to look back on some of the

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Monday Miscellany

Book review: “The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing,” by Ewan Clayton Anyone who loves books will be interested in this book, which tells the story of typography: Writing matters, says Ewan Clayton, calligrapher, former monk, design and media professor and visual consultant to Xerox in Palo Alto, Calif., the folks who made the first

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bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey

  Have you noticed how similar are the stories of Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, and Harry Potter? All three of these ordinary fellows set out on a long journey, fraught with danger, to undertake a task with a little help from their friends. When Joseph Campbell examined the mythologies of the world’s major civilizations, he

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Monday Miscellany

The Best Book You’ve Never Read: ‘Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age’ On the Publishers Weekly blog Gabe Habash describes what can be an elusive concept, narrative voice: Books that are voice-driven are, of course, dependent on the strength of the voice. Think about the best character-narrators you’ve read: maybe it’s Scout or Holden Caulfield

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Monday Miscellany

I’ll be traveling for the next three weeks. Therefore, updates here will be sparse. The 9 Best Books That Don’t Exist From Publishers Weekly: It’s time to make you really sad: here are 9 great books…that don’t actually exist. But while the world would certainly be a better place if they did exist (except #4

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Monday Miscellany

Why GR’s new review rules are censorship – Some thoughts Late Friday (US time) Goodreads announced a change in review and shelving policy, and immediately started deleting readers’ reviews and shelves. In doing this they became censors. Limiting readers’ ability to discuss the cultural context of a book is censorship designed to promote authors’ interests.

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Monday Miscellany

The Best Births In Literature In honor of the birth last week of Britain’s Royal Heir, The Atlantic compiled this list of the five best birth scenes in literature. Are there any others you’d add to this list? Literature’s Fight Club Katherine Hill, author of the recently published novel The Violet Hour, admits: I have

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Monday Miscellany

The top 10 classic spy novels From Joseph Conrad to John le Carré, intelligence historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones picks the fiction that best reveals the secrets of espionage “So my selection of novels reflects the interests of a historian, and draws on both domestic and foreign espionage. They are “classics” in being of some antiquity, and

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Monday Miscellany

Learning to learn: the heart of reading Ally of Scoop.it (the curation service that I use for Literature & Psychology) describes how she went about learning to read for deep meaning. She based her strategy on an article by Maryanne Wolf, the John DiBiaggio Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, and

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