Surface Reading: An Introduction (2009)

2025-10-31

Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot (2007)

2025-10-31

Apartment Stories

2023-11-10

Reading as if for Death

Critical Inquiry · 2022-03-01 · 1 citations

“Reading as if for Death” asks how people live in the face of imminent death by analyzing Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach. The few critics who have commented on this novel have focused on its message about the dangers of nuclear weapons. This article argues that this middlebrow Australian bestseller, which has never gone out of print, is also an important contribution to the literature of death and dying. In its focus on characters who may well be dead within a year but continue to plant gardens and learn shorthand, the novel departs from common views of everyday life as passive, static, and immanent, instead portraying it as centered around acts of repair and future-oriented planning. In contrast to representations of mortality that emphasize transcendence and enlightenment, On the Beach sympathetically conveys the combination of certainty and uncertainty that most of its characters endure in living their final days and depicts characters for whom denial, refusing to see what is, and delusion, believing in what is not, become forms of palliative care.

Seguimos luchando:

2021-01-01

28 Life Among the Savages; Raising Demons (Shirley Jackson)

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06

Foreword

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06

It features writers writing about rare, forgotten, and unsung works that changed their lives and could change yours.A guide for anyone who has ever found themselves perplexed about what to select in a library or bookstore, B-Side Books is an atlas for novice explorers, picky readers, contrarians drawn to what other people aren't reading, and epicures who seek to go beyond this year's most notable books.The essays collected here proffer delightfully unusual suggestions about what to read.More importantly, they also model how to read.In the spirit of Public Books, B-Side Books provides the distinctive savor and savvy that come from blending expertise with pleasure, rigor with enthusiasm, and scholarship with appreciation.

Frontmatter

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06

VLC volume 48 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

Victorian Literature and Culture · 2020

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Geography

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Acknowledgments

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

• Computer Science
• Computer Science