Libraries in literature /

"This multi-authored volume is the first book-length critical examination of the ways in which libraries have been depicted in imaginative writing from the late Middle Ages until the present. After showing how depictions of libraries by Rabelais and Cervantes came to permeate anglophone culture...

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Bibliographic Details
Other Authors: Crawford, Alice, 1958- (Editor), Crawford, Robert, 1959- (Editor)
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2022.
Edition:First edition.
Subjects:
Online Access:Connect to the full text of this electronic book
Description
Summary:"This multi-authored volume is the first book-length critical examination of the ways in which libraries have been depicted in imaginative writing from the late Middle Ages until the present. After showing how depictions of libraries by Rabelais and Cervantes came to permeate anglophone culture during and after the Renaissance, the book shows in detail how representations of the library in fiction, poetry, and drama changed throughout the ages. After several large-scale survey chapters which begin by examining medieval and Renaissance texts, individual chapters focus on selected works, authors, and topics, from Swift's ‘Battel of the Books' and the Romantic-era libraries of Austen, Scott, and their contemporaries through the entrapping bookrooms of George Eliot's Middlemarch, Margaret Oliphant's ‘The Library Window', and M. R. James's stories to the more modern crime fictions and fantasies where ‘the body in the library' becomes a familiar trope. Though this book's central focus is on British and American writing, chapters also examine in detail representations of the library in the work of Borges, Eco, Murakami, and more recent writers in France and Russia. Markedly international in its scope, Libraries in Literature also contains chapters that pay particular attention to issues of gender, the politics of national identity, and the depiction of librarians"--Publisher's description.
Physical Description:1 online resource (x, 294 pages)
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:0191946168
9780191946165
9780192668264
0192668269
9780192668257
0192668250