Andrew Bennett

What is this thing called literature? Why study it? And how? Relating literature to topics such as dreams, politics, life, death, the ordinary and the uncanny, This Thing Called Literature establishes a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle expertly weave an essential love of literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work and the sort of questions and ideas they provoke. The book’s three parts reflect the fundamental components of studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. The authors use helpful and wide-ranging examples and summaries, offering rich reflections on the question ‘What is literature?’ and on what they term ‘creative reading’. The new edition has been revised throughout with extensive updates to the further reading and a new chapter on creative non-fiction. Bennett and Royle’s accessible and thought-provoking style encourages a deep engagement with literary texts. This essential guide to the study of literature is an eloquent celebration of the value and pleasure of reading.

What is this thing called literature? Why study it? And how? Relating literature to topics such as dreams, politics, life, death, the ordinary and the uncanny, This Thing Called Literature establishes a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle expertly weave an essential love of literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work and the sort of questions and ideas they provoke. The book’s three parts reflect the fundamental components of studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. The authors use helpful and wide-ranging examples and summaries, offering rich reflections on the question ‘What is literature?’ and on what they term ‘creative reading’. The new edition has been revised throughout with extensive updates to the further reading and a new chapter on creative non-fiction. Bennett and Royle’s accessible and thought-provoking style encourages a deep engagement with literary texts. This essential guide to the study of literature is an eloquent celebration of the value and pleasure of reading.

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Monty Python and Hilary Mantel are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter.The sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout. In addition, four new chapters – ‘Literature’, ‘Loss’, ‘Human’ and ‘Migrant’ – engage with exciting recent developments in literary studies. As well as fully up-to-date further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and an invaluable glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Monty Python and Hilary Mantel are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter.The sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout. In addition, four new chapters – ‘Literature’, ‘Loss’, ‘Human’ and ‘Migrant’ – engage with exciting recent developments in literary studies. As well as fully up-to-date further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and an invaluable glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

Look to the North Star and Imagine the Possibilities, With Hope for all the Tomorrows, The Peace Plant Prophecy bringsLove and Kindness into the Lives of Children of all Ages...

Have you ever had that 'wow' moment? That moment of self-discovery? Do you remember how you responded when you got that one piece of information that just blew your mind? Or what about that timely word that literally changed your life and you just had to share it. That is exactly how I feel about the subject of this book, Water Baptism. As a certified church boy from birth, I had assumed that I knew about everything the church had to offer. I felt this way for much of my adult life. That's when God orchestrated things so that I would be introduced to a truth that would change my entire life. Since 1998 I have been on a journey of searching and seeking out the truth concerning baptism. This book details that journey and the truths that I have discovered along the way. This book can be divided into two parts. the first part details the events and steps that lead to both my study and discovery of baptismal truths. The second portion discusses the Biblical truths that I have found from that journey, providing scriptural evidence. It is my prayer that by the end of this book you too will know the truth about the water.

Suicide Century investigates suicide as a prominent theme in twentieth-century and contemporary literature. Andrew Bennett argues that with the waning of religious and legal prohibitions on suicide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the increasing influence of medical and sociological accounts of its causes and significance in the twentieth century, literature responds to the act and idea as an increasingly normalised but incessantly baffling phenomenon. Discussing works by a number of major authors from the long twentieth century, the book explores the way that suicide makes and unmakes subjects, assumes and disrupts meaning, induces and resists empathy, and insists on and makes inconceivable our understanding of ourselves and of others.

Much literary criticism focuses on literary producers and their products, but an important part of such work considers the end-user, the reader. It asks such questions as: how far can the author condition the response of the reader, and how much does the reader create the meaning of a text? Dr Bennett's collection includes important essays from such writers and critics as Wolfgang Iser, Mary Jacobus, Roger Chartier, Michel de Certeau, Shoshana Felman, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man and Yves Bonnefoy. It looks in turn at deconstructionist, feminist, new historicist and psychoanalytical response to the school. The book then considers the act of reading itself, discussing such issues as the uniqueness of any reading and the difficulties involved in its analysis.

This study argues that ignorance is a part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. It sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing. From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. There is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human.Now available in paperback, this exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.

Andrew Bennett challenges the popular conception of Wordsworth as a writer who didn't so much write poetry as compose it aloud or in his head (usually while walking, and preferably while ascending mountains). The act and idea of writing is in fact central to the themes and to the rhetorical texture of Wordsworth's poetry. This wide-ranging study considers various aspects of Wordsworth's compositional practice, including questions of revision and dictation, of monumental inscription and graffiti, of talking and thinking, and of the poet's own theory of composition, and examines the implications of a critical tradition that erroneously assumes that Wordsworth employed exclusively 'oral' modes of composition. For Wordsworth, acts of writing were important dimensions of his poetry and indeed of his sense of personal and poetic identity. Bennett contends that a sustained attention to the question of writing in Wordsworth produces compelling readings of the major poems.

Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing. From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human.This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.

Andrew Bennett challenges the popular conception of Wordsworth as a writer who didn't so much write poetry as compose it aloud or in his head (usually while walking, and preferably while ascending mountains). The act and idea of writing is in fact central to the themes and to the rhetorical texture of Wordsworth's poetry. This wide-ranging study considers various aspects of Wordsworth's compositional practice, including questions of revision and dictation, of monumental inscription and graffiti, of talking and thinking, and of the poet's own theory of composition, and examines the implications of a critical tradition that erroneously assumes that Wordsworth employed exclusively 'oral' modes of composition. For Wordsworth, acts of writing were important dimensions of his poetry and indeed of his sense of personal and poetic identity. Bennett contends that a sustained attention to the question of writing in Wordsworth produces compelling readings of the major poems.

This 1999 book examines the way in which the Romantic period's culture of posterity inaugurates a tradition of writing which demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can be properly appreciated only after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the poetry and poetics of the Romantic period. He surveys the contexts for this transformation of the relationship between poet and audience, engaging with issues such as the commercialization of poetry, the gendering of the canon, and the construction of poetic identity. Bennett goes on to discuss the strangely compelling effects which this reception theory produces in the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, who have come to embody, for posterity, the figure of the Romantic poet.

The emergence of observing systems such as acoustically-tracked floats in the deep ocean, and surface drifters navigating by satellite has seen renewed interest in Lagrangian fluid dynamics. Starting from the foundations of elementary kinematics and assuming some familiarity of Eulerian fluid dynamics, this 2006 book reviews the classical and new exact solutions of the Lagrangian framework, and then addresses the general solvability of the resulting general equations of motion. A unified account of turbulent diffusion and dispersion is offered, with applications among others to plankton patchiness in the ocean. Written at graduate level, the book provides the first detailed and comprehensive analytical development of the Lagrangian formulation of fluid dynamics, of interest not only to applied mathematicians but also oceanographers, meteorologists, mechanical engineers, astrophysicists and indeed all investigators of the dynamics of fluids.

Andrew Bennett's original study of Keats focuses on questions of narrative and audience as a means to offer new readings of the major poems. It discusses ways in which reading is 'figured' in Keats's poetry, and suggests that such 'figures of reading' have themselves determined certain modes of response to Keats's texts. Together with important new readings of Keats's poetry, the study presents a significant rethinking of the relationship between Romantic poetry and its audience. Developing recent discussions in literary theory concerning narrative, readers and reading, the nature of the audience for poetry, and the Romantic 'invention' of posterity, Bennett elaborates a sophisticated and historically specific reconceptualization of Romantic writing.