Author Representations in Literary Reading investigates the role of the author in the mind of the reader. It is the first book-length empirical study on generated author inferences by readers of literature. It bridges the gap between theories which hold that the author is irrelevant and those that give him prominence. By combining insights and methods from both cognitive psychology and literary theory, this book contributes to a better understanding of how readers process literary texts and what role their assumptions about an author play. A series of experiments demonstrate that readers generate author inferences during the process of reading, which they use to create an image of the text's author. The findings suggest that interpretations about the author play a pivotal role in the literary reading process. This book is relevant to scholars and students in all areas of the cognitive sciences, including literary studies and psychology.

New technologies are changing our reading habits. Laptops, e-readers, tablets and other handheld devices supply new platforms for reading, and we must learn to manage them by scrolling, clicking or tapping. Reading Today places reading in current literary and cultural contexts in order to analyse how these contexts challenge our conceptions of who reads, what reading is, how we read, where we read, and for what purposes – and then responds to the questions this analysis raises. Is our reading experience becoming a ‘flat’ one? And does reading in a media environment favour quick reading? Alongside these questions, the contributors unpack emerging strategies of reading.They consider, for example, how paying attention to readers’ emotional reactions as an indispensable component of reading affects our conception of the reading process. Other chapters consider how reading can be explored through such topics as experimental literature, the contemporary encyclopedic novel and the healing power of books.

This introduction to practicing literary theory is a reader consisting of extracts from critical analyses, largely by 20th century Anglo-American literary critics, set around major literary texts that undergraduate students are known to be familiar with. It is specifically targeted to present literary criticism through practical examples of essays by literary theorists themselves, on texts both within and outside the literary canon. Four example essays are included for each author/text presented.

" A clear and accessible demonstration of how contemporary literary theories can be applied to a wide range of texts, from Shakespeare, Bunyan, Sterne, Keats, to James, Stevens, Joyce, Pinter, Updike, and Arthur Miller."

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,8, University of Leipzig, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this study is to analyse the representation of women in utopian and dystopian literature. The research question of this paper is: To what extent is the representation of women and their status in the fictional societies determined by gender relations in the context of the distribution of power? To explore this question the historical context in which s/he wrote the novel is also assumed to be important. The approach applied to this thesis is based on gender and literary studies. In order to analyse the representation of women, this thesis offers a coherent structure consisting of four important steps. Firstly, each novel will be introduced with a brief paragraph on the historical background. Secondly, the power relations of the society have to be observed. Thirdly, the resulting gender relations will be analysed. Finally, in the context of the prior three steps of this thesis, the representation of women will be observed. In addition, I will use traditional female stereotypes in literature as a criterion for the analysis of the representation of women. The novels chosen for this purpose are Herland, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1915, followed by the dystopia Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley in 1932. The final novel will be the dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margarete Atwood in 1985. The last section of this thesis will compare the results of the analyses and clarify in how far power and gender relations determine the representation of women in utopian and dystopian literature in the light of the historical context of the novel.