Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter

While philosophers, historians, theologians, sociologists, educators and children’s literature specialists, even business professors have take on Harry Potter in single-author studies and essay collections, literary scholars have yet to give these novels the careful attention they deserve. This book, “Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter,” attempts to remedy that by assembling a series of scholarly articles on the Harry Potter novels from a variety of literary perspectives

This Book is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics

Second-wave feminism and the written word\u27s power to incite social change The Women\u27s Liberation Movement held a foundational belief in the written word\u27s power to incite social change. In this new collection, Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr curate essays that reveal how second-wave feminists embraced this potential with a vengeance. The authors in This Book Is an Action investigate the dynamic print culture that emerged as the feminist movement reawakened in the late 1960s. The works created by women shined a light on taboo topics and offered inspiring accounts of personal transformation. Yet, as the essayists reveal, the texts represented something far greater: a distinct and influential American literary renaissance. On the one hand, feminists took control of the process by building a network of publishers and distributors owned and operated by women. On the other, women writers threw off convention to venture into radical and experimental forms, poetry, and genre storytelling, and in so doing created works that raised the consciousness of a generation. Examining feminist print culture from its structures and systems to defining texts by Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker, This Book Is an Action suggests untapped possibilities for the critical and aesthetic analysis of the diverse range of literary production during feminism\u27s second wave.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1022/thumbnail.jp

The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah\u27s Book Club

The Oprah Affect explores the cultural impact of Oprah’s Book Club, particularly in light of debates about the definition and purpose of literature in American culture. For the critics collected here, Oprah’s Book Club stands, in the context of American literary history, not as an egregious undermining of who we are and what we represent, as some have maintained, but as the latest manifestation of a tradition that encourages symbiotic relationships between readers and texts. Powered by women writers and readers, novels in this tradition attract crowds, sell well, and make unabashed appeals to emotion. The essays consider the interlocking issues of affect, affinity, accessibility, and activism in the context of this tradition. Juxtaposing book history; reading practices; literary analysis; feminist criticism; and communication, religious, political, and cultural studies; the contributors map a range of possibilities for further research on Oprah’s Book Club.A complete chronological list of Book Club picks is included.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1180/thumbnail.jp