Libraries in Literature

NOTE EDITORE

Unashamedly a book for the bookish, yet accessible and frequently entertaining, this is the first book devoted to how libraries are depicted in imaginative writing. Covering fiction, poetry, and drama from the late Middle Ages to the present, it runs the gamut of British and American literature, as well as examining a range of fiction in other languages--from Rabelais and Cervantes to modern and contemporary French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian writing. While the tropes of the complex catalogue and the bibliomaniacal reader persist throughout the centuries, libraries also emerge as societal battle-sites where issues of personality, gender, cultural power, and national identity are contested repeatedly and often in surprising ways. As well as examining how libraries were deployed in their work by canonical authors from Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Swift to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges, the volume also examines in detail the haunted libraries of Margaret Oliphant and M. R. James, and a range of much less familiar historic and contemporary authors. Alert to the depiction of librarians as well as of book-rooms and institutional readers, this book will inform, entertain, and delight. At a time when traditional libraries are under pressure, Libraries in Literature shows the power of their lasting fascination.

SOMMARIO

1 - Rabelais, Cervantes, and Libraries in Fiction2 - Dramatic Libraries3 - Battle-Sites of Books4 - What Are Books For? Darcy's Library, Crabbe's The Library, and Shillito's The Country Book Club5 - Libraries and the Formation of Character in Nineteenth-Century Novels6 - Margaret Oliphant's 'The Library Window'7 - M. R. James's Libraries8 - The Body in the Library: Christie and Sayers9 - On the Shelf? Women, Librarians and Agency in Twentieth-Century Fiction10 - The Act of Borrowing; or, Some Libraries in American Literature11 - 'Modified Bliss': Libraries in Modern Poetry12 - Borges's Libraries13 - Library and Scriptorium in The Name of the Rose14 - Murakami's Strange Library15 - Fantastic Books and Where to Find Them: Libraries in Fairytale and Fantasy

AUTORE

Alice Crawford has worked as a university administrator, tutor in English Literature, and as an academic librarian at the universities of Glasgow, Dundee, and St Andrews. She retired in 2018 as Digital Humanities Research Librarian at the University of St Andrews Library. Robert Crawford has held posts at the universities of Oxford, Glasgow, and St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780192855732
• Dimensioni: 240 x 23.0 x 164 mm Ø 612 gr
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pagine Arabe: 304