This Thing Called Literature

Cover image courtesy and copyright Routledge 2015

This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (Routledge) is written for people starting literary studies at college or university, or anyone who has an interest in fiction, poems, short stories, or plays. It's the third co-authored book by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, professors of English at the University of Bristol and the University of Sussex, UK, respectively. The book contains a series of chapters based on the three activities involved in studying literature--reading, thinking, and writing. The writing section includes creative writing and writing short fiction. An essay chapter goes into detail with tips on how to prepare, plan, structure, revise, and finish an academic essay. The middle section focuses on thinking critically about literature, and the reading section covers all the major literary forms.

"In a sense it's very simple: we want to teach people to read," write the authors. "To get the most out of a literary work you need some strategies, some techniques--some ways of reading, ideas about where to start, a critical vocabulary or set of terms, and a certain awareness of the rhetorical resources that writers use. It's quite a common experience for someone to enjoy reading a novel or poem, a story or a play, to find it interesting and even inspiring, but not really to know quite what to make of it, to be uncertain about how to think or talk about it, how to analyze the work in an informed and a formal way. In this book we try to help students and others get a sense of where to start with a literary text--and then where to go from there."

The book seeks to open up texts through discussion of several examples that show how to write about a poem, play, or story. It also presents the idea of creative reading, or ways of reading that are rigorous, careful, attentive to historical context--being mindful of specific denotations, connotations, and nuances of words, and so on. A kind of double reading that recognizes a work's meaning, as well as its linguistic and rhetorical features, its literary form: what the text says and how it says it. "Reading well, or creatively, entails not just noticing what other readers might be expected to notice, but also adding something of your own--taking a path or flight across the poem that involves new connections, new resonances, new possibilities."