A remarkable and frankly personal collection of seventeen lectures by an award-winning teacher with forty years of experience that covers an unusual range of literary texts regularly studied and enjoyed. The book models what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature and how it can change our lives.

Richard Jacobs is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Brighton, School of Humanities, where he was subject leader for literature and Principal Lecturer for many years and where he received teaching excellence awards. His publications include A Beginner's Guide to Critical Reading: An Anthology of Literary Texts (Routledge), Teaching Narrative (Palgrave), chapters on the 20th century novel (Penguin and Palgrave), editions for Penguin Classics, articles on literature and the teaching of literature, and several reviews.

Introduction

1. The myth of the Fall and its impact: Pullman, Lewis and others
2. Claribel's story: a few thoughts on gender, race and colonialism in The Tempest
3. Wuthering Heights: myth and the wounds of loss
4. Beckett's Waiting for Godot: transforming lives
5. Great Expectations: intertextualities, endings and life after plot
6. Emily Dickinson: 'And then the windows failed'
7. Emma: rhetoric, irony and the reader's assault course
8. Dorian Gray: 'queering' the text
9. The Fallen Woman: Emma Bovary and (many) others
10. Two transgressive American women: Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
11. Hamlet / Lear: realism / modernism
12. John Keats: three (or is it two?) poems and thoughts on 'late style'
13. Republicanism, regicide and 'The Musgrave Ritual'
14. Jean Rhys: her texts from the 1930s
15. Twelfth Night: Dream-Gift
16. Please read Proust
17. Paradise Lost: radical politics, gender and education