Studying Literature in English

Studying Literature in English

Studying Literature in English is an accessible guide for literature students

around the world.

This book:

Grounds literature and the study of literature throughout by referencing a

small selection of well-known novels, plays and poems

Examines the central questions that readers ask when confronting literary

texts, and shows how these make literary theory meaningful and necessary

Links British, American and postcolonial literature into a coherent whole

Discusses film as literature and provides the basic conceptual tools in order

to study film within a literary framework

Places particular emphasis on interdisciplinarity by examining the connections

between the study of literature and other disciplines

Provides an annotated list of further reading

From principal literary genres, periods and theory, to strategies for reading,

research and essay-writing, Dominic Rainsford provides an engaging introduction

to the most important aspects of studying literature in English.

Dominic Rainsford is Professor of Literatures in English at Aarhus University,

Denmark, having previously taught in Britain, Poland and the United States. His

publications include Authorship, Ethics and the Reader (1997), Literature,

Identity and the English Channel (2002), and many articles on Dickens. He

currently works on literature, ethics and quantification.

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Studying Literature in English

An introduction

Dominic Rainsford

First published 2014

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2014 Dominic Rainsford

The right of Dominic Rainsford to be identified as author of this work has

been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now

known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any

information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from

the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation

without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Rainsford, Dominic, 1965-

Studying Literature in English : an introduction / Dominic Rainsford.

pages cm

1. English literature--History and criticism. I. Title.

PR83.R33 2014

820’.9--dc23

2013047521

ISBN: 978-0-415-69922-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-69923-5 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-48382-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon

by Taylor & Francis Books

To Saffron Steenberg Rainsford, who was conceived at about the

same time and is already well into literature. Not just the apple of

my eye, but the whole fruit salad.

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Using this book x

PART I

Beginnings 1

1 Good morrow 3

2 What is literature, and who does it belong to? 8

3 Canons 15

PART II

Form and genre 21

4 Poetry 23

5 The thing which is not 34

6 Prose fiction 43

7 Plays and films 57

PART III

Periods and movements 71

8 Medieval and early modern 73

9 From Colonial America and Restoration England to 1900 87

10 From 1900 to the present 104

PART IV

Positions, identities, ideas 119

11 The place of literature 121

12 Literary theory 139

PART V

Over to you 161

13 Primary and secondary sources 163

14 Reading, research, writing 171

Further reading 179

Index 188

viii Contents

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has helped me learn more about subjects that I have been

trying to teach for many years – to students at University College London,

Imperial College London, the University of Warsaw, Loyola University Chicago,

Aberystwyth University and, since 1998, Aarhus University. I am grateful to

many hundreds of these students for their enthusiasm and hard work, and for

the countless ways in which they have helped to shape the arguments in the

following pages. Those who took part in my ‘Studying Literature in English’

course at Aarhus in 2012 made a particularly significant contribution.

Several of my colleagues at Aarhus read parts of the typescript and made

helpful comments: Mathias Clasen, Tabish Khair, Jody Pennington, Matthias

Stephan and Johanna Wood. I am particularly grateful to Vera Alexander,

Hans Bertens, Susan Bruce, Fernando Galván and Francesca Orestano, who,

together with an anonymous reviewer, read the proposal for the book, and

made detailed and valuable recommendations. My editors at Routledge – Stacey

Carter, Polly Dodson, Emma Joyes, Ruth Moody and Elizabeth Levine – have

been extremely efficient, patient and understanding.

I am grateful to Faber and Faber (UK) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (USA)

for permission to reproduce Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Had I not been awake’; to

Faber and Faber (UK) for permission to use an extract from Seamus Heaney’s

Beowulf; and to Pan Macmillan for permission to use Carol Ann Duffy’s poem

‘Anne Hathaway’.

Using this book

This book sets out to give you almost everything that you need as someone

beginning to think seriously about literature in English, and not too much that

you don’t. Although it divides into various parts, which respectively concentrate

on formal, historical and theoretical approaches, it is designed to be read from

cover to cover: each chapter assumes information from the previous ones.

Studying Literature in English is designed, first and foremost, as a point of entry

for people who are engaged with the subject as first- or second-year students at a

university or other institution of higher education. It is meant to be particularly

useful to students in countries where English is not the first language and where

the equivalent of a British A-level in English Literature, taken for granted by a lot

of similar-looking books, does not exist. However, even students in primarily

English-speaking countries should be able to benefit from the comprehensive

approach offered here, especially since literature is increasingly being taught,

almost everywhere, as part of larger modular structures, where study time is

rationed, and where the ability to see an academic field as a whole, and connect

it with other ones, is very important. This book tries to tell you all that you

need to know about literature, but also where to place literature in the context

of a wider process of learning.

A guiding principle of the book is that it is impossible to be an effective student

of literature without being a keen and accomplished reader. A complementary

but less obvious claim is that it is impossible to be an accomplished reader

without, in a sense, being a student. Of course, people can derive a great deal of

pleasure from literature, and have considerable insight into it, without having

studied it systematically: it is only very recently that some authors have delib￾erately written with a university-based readership in mind. But even books that

we have known and loved for decades – perhaps since we were children – can

take on new dimensions, offer new pleasures and enlightenment, if we come

back to them with more systematic knowledge about what literature is, how it

works, and what people tend to do with it. In other words, it is hoped that this

book will also have something to offer people who simply ‘study’ literature as

engaged readers, not necessarily in the context of a degree programme.

Many literary texts, from different parts of the world, traditions, genres and

periods, will be mentioned in the coming pages. Repeated reference will be

made to a much smaller number of specific works, which – especially the longer

ones – are among those most widely read and taught, wherever literature in

English is studied. Most of these are to be found in widely used anthologies. If

these relatively few texts – including Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Jonathan Swift’s

Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Robert Louis Stevenson’s

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named

Desire, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo –

are read (or, in the case of Vertigo, viewed) before or in parallel with this book,

so much the better. But this is not assumed. You will be told (or reminded)

about the texts, so that you can follow the arguments being made. Moreover,

these arguments are designed to be relevant to any reading list that you are

likely to be faced with in your studies, or that you yourself may choose.

A single book cannot say everything that is important about literature in

English. For some readers, Studying Literature in English may be sufficient in

itself, for others it will just be the beginning. It will help you to make a start

with the ‘mechanics’ of literature, with literary periods and movements, with

literary theory, and with the processes of researching and writing about literature.

There are great advantages, I believe, in tackling all of these subjects together.

But there are excellent books that specialise in each of them. Studying Literature

in English concludes, therefore, with comprehensive recommendations for further

reading.

Using this book xi

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Part I

Beginnings

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