The Secret Garden is a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett first published in book form in 1911, after serialisation in The American Magazine. Set in England, it is one of Burnett's most popular novels and seen as a classic of English children's literature. Several stage and film adaptations have been made. The American edition was published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company with illustrations by Maria Louise Kirk and the British edition by Heinemann with illustrations by Charles Heath Robinson.
Speak, published in 1999, is a young adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that tells the story of high school freshman Melinda Sordino. After Melinda is raped at an end of summer party, she calls the police, who break up the party. Melinda is then ostracized by her peers because she will not say why she called the police. Unable to verbalize what happened, Melinda nearly stops speaking altogether, expressing her voice through the art she produces for Mr. Freeman's class. This expression slowly helps Melinda acknowledge what happened, face her problems, and recreate her identity.
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.
Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget. She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music and travel.
Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". Her seminal work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.
Victorian literature refers to English literature during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). The 19th century is considered by some to be the Golden Age of English Literature, especially for British novels. It was in the Victorian era that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. English writing from this era reflects the major transformations in most aspects of English life, from scientific, economic, and technological advances to changes in class structures and the role of religion in society. Famous novelists from this period include Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the three Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling.
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.
Ruth Ellen Kocher is an American poet. She is the recipient of the PEN/Open Book Award, the Dorset Prize, the Green Rose Prize, and the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado - Boulder where and serves as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities.
Lara Vapnyar is a Russian-American writer currently living in the United States. She studied comparative literature at CUNY and worked with André Aciman and Louis Menand.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his pioneering work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.
Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context.
Barbara Foley is an American writer and the Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She focuses her research and teaching on U.S. literary radicalism, African American literature, and Marxist criticism. The author of six books and over seventy scholarly articles, review essays, and book chapters, she has published on literary theory, academic politics, US proletarian literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the writers Ralph Ellison and Jean Toomer. Throughout her career, her work has emphasized the centrality of antiracism and Marxist class analysis to both literary study and social movements.
Regina Schwartz is a scholar of English literature and elements of Jewish and Christian religion. A Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern University, she has been known historically for her research and teaching on 17th-century literature, on the Hebrew Bible, and on the interface of literature with the subjects of philosophy, law, and religion.
Joanne Schultz Frye is a Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the College of Wooster. Frye is known for her feminist literary criticism and interdisciplinary inquiry into motherhood. She specializes in research on fiction by and about women, such as the work of Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, and Jane Lazarre.
Ruth Scodel is an American Classics scholar, and the D.R. Shackleton-Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. She specialises in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in Homer, Hesiod and Greek Tragedy. Her research has been influenced by narrative theory, cognitive approaches, and politeness theory.
Claire Kahane is an American writer, scholar and feminist literary critic. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University at Buffalo, where she taught from 1974 to 2000. Kahane is the author of Passions of the Voice, a study of narrative and "the strategies of hysteric discourse." Scholar Christine Wiesenthal, writing in the journal Victorian Review, wrote that "the confluence of feminist, narrative, and psychoanalytic theory" in Passions of the Voice was "an innovative and provocative mix." Kahane is also the co-editor, with Charles Bernheimer, of In Dora's Case, a collection of essays from a feminist perspective criticizing Sigmund Freud's efforts to "put words into Dora's mouth." Kahane completed her undergraduate education at the City College of New York and earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the fiction of Flannery O'Connor.
Karen L. Hellekson is an American author and scholar who researches science fiction and fan studies. In the field of science fiction, she is known for her research on the alternate history genre, the topic of her 2001 book, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, and has also published on the author Cordwainer Smith. In fan studies, she is known for her work on fan fiction and the culture of the fan community. She has co-edited two essay collections on fan fiction with Kristina Busse, and in 2008, co-founded the academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, also with Busse.
Holiday House: A Book for the Young is a novel by Catherine Sinclair. It was first published in Edinburgh by William Whyte & Co. in 1839.
Empathy, as an interdisciplinary concept, usually studied within social and psychological context, plays an important role in consuming literature and fiction in particular. This concept is known as narrative empathy. Defined by Taylor et al. in 2002–2003, individuals experience narrative empathy when they are able to feel with, take the perspectives of, or experience a simulation with the likeness thereof a character within that narrative. When looking at empathy in literature, there are two main concepts that can be looked at. Learning empathy through literature, or narrative empathy, is more thoroughly and academically studied than narratives of empathy, which are prevalent across various types of fiction.
