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Students need a book which can show them actual means of thinking their way into literary texts. Too often they are put off by the resistant surface of literature, or made apprehensive by its eminence, or are convinced that there is nothing more than the obvious to be said about it. This book aims to meet this need. It seeks to involve the student in the actual process of thinking about literature, showing how to start with one idea and move to further and often new insights. To this end it presents a series of demonstrations in which the reader is invited to participate, without having to accept the author's own interpretations.
A pioneer of criticism on fantasy literature, Colin Manlove (1942–2020) taught English and Scottish literature at the University of Edinburgh for more than twenty-six years, retiring as reader in 1993; he was awarded a DLitt in 1990. During his long and prolific career, he wrote numerous books including Modern Fantasy (1975), Christian Fantasy (1992), Scottish Fantasy Literature (1994), and The Fantasy Literature of England (1999). He also wrote books on Shakespeare, children’s literature, science fiction, and George MacDonald, the most recent of which, George MacDonald’s Children’s Fantasies and the Divine Imagination, was published in 2019.
“This brief volume, written for British undergraduates to suggest ways by which they might better read poetry, novels, and plays, is an exceedingly useful book, for other English-speaking students of literature as well. The author assumes that the careful reader looks for anomalies in the text, for patterns, comparisons, connections, inconsistencies, and omissions (each of these is the subject of a chapter). To illustrate how the reader might look for these features and then use them to interpret the text, Manlove uses examples mainly from English literature but also from American. The texts are varied and well-chosen and the analyses straightforward. The author does not display his erudition but seeks to guide the novice reader. This is an excellent book for the beginning and even the advanced student of literature, and should become a staple of undergraduate libraries.”
—A. C. Purves, SUNY at Albany, in Choice
“Subtitled A Guide to Interpreting Literary Texts, this book fills the students' need for an actual means of thinking their way into literary texts. It seeks to involve them in the process of starting with one idea and moving on to further and often new insights, thus presenting a series of demonstrations in which they can participate without having to accept the author's own interpretations.”
— Education and Training
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