This is a teacher's book, written by an able teacher.... Most people are interested in literature because of a deep love for literature itself. They want to understand the reasons for that love. Ryken helps us do this, but he also helps Christians understand and validate their love for literature.... Ryken has also provided a solid means for non-Christians to understand a Christian perspective on literature.... It [Windows to the World] comes closer to defining the goal and task of the teacher of literature than any work I have read." - Christianity and Literature

"Literature and Weather. Shakespeare – Goethe – Zola" is dedicated to the relation between literature and weather, i.e. a cultural practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes an archaeology of literature’s affinity to the weather which tells the story of literature’s weathery self-reflection and its creative reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social circumstances. The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola’s The Rougon-Macquarts. These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The study is a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature’s indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of literature’s agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural formation.

The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression 'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific connection between politics as a form of collective practice and literature as a historically determined regime of the art of writing. It implies that literature intervenes in the parceling out of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible, that is the arena of the political. This book seeks to show how the literary revolution shatters the perceptible order that underpinned traditional hierarchies, but also why literary equality foils any bid to place literature in the service of politics or in its place. It tests its hypotheses on certain writers: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hugo, Mallarmé, Brecht and Borges, to name a few. It also shows the consequences of this for psychoanalytical intepretation, historical narration and philosophical conceptualization.

The essays in this volume are informed by a variety of theoretical assumptions and of critical methodologies, but they all share an interest in the intersections of word and image in a variety of media. This unifying rationale secures the present collection's central position in the current critical context, defined as it predominantly is by ways of reading that are based on a relational nexus. The intertextual, the intermedial, the intersemiotic are indeed foregrounded and combined in these essays, conceptually as much as in the critical practices favoured by the various contributions. Studies of literature in its relation to pictorial genres enjoy a relative prominence in the volume - but the range of media and of approaches considered is broad enough to include photography, film, video, television, comic strips, animated film, public art, material culture. The backgrounds of contributors are likewise diverse - culturally, academically, linguistically. The volume combines contributions by prominent scholars and critics with essays by younger scholars, from a variety of backgrounds. The resulting plurality of perspective is indeed a source of new insights into the relations between writing and seeing, and it contributes to making this collection an exciting new contribution to word and image studies.

This book offers a defence of ethical reading in secondary school English classes at a time when reformers and policy makers are trying to reorganize English language arts around technical skills or politics. Ross Collin shows how students and teachers use literature as a venue for exploring their own and others' ethical ideas and practices and argues that moral inquiry in English class is a distinctly social endeavour. The book draws ideas from English education and moral philosophy. From English education, Collin explores social reading, or what Louise Rosenblatt named 'transaction', looking at texts commonly taught in secondary school English, including Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming. From philosophy, he draws on arguments about moral vision and literature developed by Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and Nora Hämäläinen, and develops ideas, tacit in English education, about reading with moral vision. He concludes by proposing a new theory of moral vision in transactional reading.