Published by Quercus, 2010, hardcover, index, 205 pages, condition: as new.
Literature suffers from appearing both deceptively easy and dauntingly difficult. We all like to think we can read a novel and understand what 'genre', 'style' and 'narrative' mean, but do we really understand them fully and how they can enrich our reading experience? How should we approach the works of great writers such as William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen? And what can we hope to learn from apparently difficult ideas such as 'hermeneutics', 'affective fallacy' and 'bricolage'? 50 Literature Ideas you Really Need to Know is the essential guide to all the important forms, concepts, themes and movements in literature. It provides a clear, opinionated and thorough overview of theories about the nature of language and meaning, and outlines the thinking behind key literary concepts such as postmodernism, semiology, postcolonialism and structuralism. Best-selling author and critic John Sutherland offers a fresh and challenging overview of literary ideas and theories, from the apparently familiar to the decidedly unfamiliar. Packed with insights and examples from both classic and popular works, it is a book that will delight anyone who has ever been mystified by literary jargon and wants to gain a deeper, more thorough enjoyment of reading and writing.
This is a fascinating and easily engaged 'de-briefing' that saves one from the otherwise odious task of learning about them 'the hard way'. Each of the 50 ideas are encapsulated in four pages (no more), and the author presents them all in an easy-to-read style with, I suspect, a little tongue-in-cheek. They range from the basics (Mimesis; Hermeneutics; etc.) through the ways literature works (Culture, Genre, Paradigm Shift, etc.), its devices (Allegory, Irony, Bricolage, Metafiction, etc.), through New Ideas (Structuralism, Postmodernism, Heteroglossia, Reception Theory, etc.), word crimes (Plagiariasm, Blasphemy, etc.) through to the 'future' (Fanfic, e-books, etc.).
If some of these headings fill you with terror, then this is the book to familiarise yourself relatively easily with the ideas they represent: besides, there is nothing to say you MUST accept them; but at least it will make you aware when others might be using one of these ideas. Remember that an idea is only an idea. If any one of these presented herein this book were to be presented as the ONLY idea about literature, then one is, of course, in trouble, since that would imply the other 49 ideas can be used to demonstrate the Death of Literature... It's not as simple as all that! And this book will help one mount a counterattack... All grist to the mill. Whether one 'really needs to know' these ideas is a moot point, but either way, I must say that I enjoyed reading this book immensely: interesting and stimulating at the same time!
