2017.02.15

💠 Week 1

Textbook: The Norton Introduction to Literature

Author: Kelly J. Mays

Kelly Mays specializes in 19th century British literature. Before joining the UNLV faculty in 2001, she served as preceptor in the Harvard Expository writing program and as assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University.

Mays is the author of "The Norton Introduction to Literature" (12th ed., 2015-16) — the textbook with which an estimated 33,000 undergraduates each year begin their college-level study of literature. Her articles on nineteenth-century publishing and reading practices, working-class poetry and autobiography, and the literary anthology have appeared in venues such as "Critical Inquiry," "Victorian Poetry," "Nineteenth-Century Contexts," and "The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature." Two other articles — "How the Victorians Un-Invented Themselves: Architecture, the 'Battle of the Styles,' and the Emergence of the Term 'Victorian'" ("Journal of Victorian Culture," 2014) and "Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror of Future History" ("Victorian Studies," 2011) — draw on material from her book-in-progress, "Victorian Self-Invention: Imagining an Era and a Style, c. 1838-1901." Funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship, this project explores just how, when, and why nineteenth-century Britons began to imagine their age, themselves, their literature, and much else as peculiarly "Victorian."   

Mays regularly teaches ENG 449B: British Literature II, ENG 470B: British Novel II, ENG 298: Writing about Literature, and a range of other undergraduate and graduate courses on Romantic, Victorian, and contemporary British literature.  

Education:

• B. A. (summa cum laude) — Emory University (1986)

• Ph.D. — Stanford University (1994)

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Publish date: 2012/09/21

About this book: The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter Eleventh Edition, is a diverse, flexible, and balanced text that offers the most carefully edited apparatus and the most interesting and useful treatment of the contexts of literature. A best seller since its first edition, The Norton Introduction to Literature continues to meet the needs of today’s students and instructors, offering trusted guidance for analyzing texts, writing thoughtfully, and appreciating literature.                                                                                           

✅ What is literature?   

Literature, in its broadest sense, is any single body of written works. More restrictively, literature is writing that is considered to be an art form, or any single writing deemed to have artistic or intellectual value, often due to deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage. Its Latin root literatura/litteratura (derived itself from littera: letter or handwriting) was used to refer to all written accounts, though contemporary definitions extend the term to include texts that are spoken or sung (oral literature). Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose; it can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama; and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).

The concept has changed meaning over time: nowadays it can broaden to have non-written verbal art forms, and thus it is difficult to agree on its origin, which can be paired with that of language or writing itself. Developments in print technology have allowed an ever-growing distribution and proliferation of written works, culminating in electronic literature.