John Sutherland

In a series of 50 accessible essays, John Sutherland introduces and explains the important forms, concepts, themes and movements in literature, drawing on insights and examples from both classic and popular works. From postmodernism to postcolonialism, William Shakespeare to Jane Austen , 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know is a complete introduction to the most important literary concepts in history.

DIVThis 'little history' takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious passion for books and reading has defined his own life. Now he guides young readers and the grown-ups in their lives on an entertaining journey 'through the wardrobe' to a greater awareness of how literature from across the world can transport us and help us to make sense of what it means to be human. Sutherland introduces great classics in his own irresistible way, enlivening his offerings with humor as well as learning: Beowulf, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the Romantics, Dickens, Moby Dick, The Waste Land, Woolf, 1984, and dozens of others. He adds to these a less-expected, personal selection of authors and works, including literature usually considered well below 'serious attention' - from the rude jests of Anglo-Saxon runes to The Da Vinci Code. With masterful digressions into various themes - censorship, narrative tricks, self-publishing, taste, creativity, and madness - Sutherland demonstrates the full depth and intrigue of reading. For younger readers, he offers a proper introduction to literature, promising to interest as much as instruct. For more experienced readers, he promises just the same./div

No previous author has attempted a book such as this: a complete history of novels written in the English language, from the genre's seventeenth-century origins to the present day. In the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s *Lives of the Poets,* acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland selects 294 writers whose works illustrate the best of every kind of fiction—from gothic, penny dreadful, and pornography to fantasy, romance, and high literature. Each author was chosen, Professor Sutherland explains, because his or her books are well worth reading and are likely to remain so for at least another century. Sutherland presents these authors in chronological order, in each case deftly combining a lively and informative biographical sketch with an opinionated assessment of the writer's work. Taken together, these novelists provide both a history of the novel and a guide to its rich variety. Always entertaining, and sometimes shocking, Sutherland considers writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe, Henry James, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Archer, and Jacqueline Susann. Written for all lovers of fiction, *Lives of the Novelists* succeeds both as introduction and re-introduction, as Sutherland presents favorite and familiar novelists in new ways and transforms the less favored and less familiar through his relentlessly fascinating readings. **

In 2012 writer John Sutherland permanently lost his sense of smell. At about the same time, he embarked on a rereading of George Orwell and—still coping with his recent disability—noticed something peculiar: Orwell was positively obsessed with smell. In this original, irreverent biography, Sutherland offers a fresh account of Orwell’s life and works, one that sniffs out a unique, scented trail that wends from Burmese Days through Nineteen Eighty-Four and on to The Road to Wigan Pier. Sutherland airs out the odors, fetors, stenches, and reeks trapped in the pages of Orwell’s books. From Winston Smith’s apartment in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which “smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats,” to the tantalizing aromas of concubine Ma Hla May’s hair in Burmese Days, with its “mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil, and jasmine,” Sutherland explores the scent narratives that abound in Orwell’s literary world. Along the way, he elucidates questions that have remained unanswered in previous biographies, addressing gaps that have kept the writer elusively from us. In doing so, Sutherland offers an entertaining but enriching look at one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and, moreover, an entirely new and sensuous way to approach literature: nose first.

Was Rochester a murderer? Did the Reverend Brontë carry a loaded pistol? What, precisely, does 'Wuthering' mean? Did the Brontës all have tiny feet? To celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë's birth, eminent Victorian scholar John Sutherland takes us on an A to Z ramble through the world of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë (and not forgetting their dissolute brother Branwell). For fans of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, here is a lighthearted miscellany freighted with a working lifetime's scholarly expertise. With his reputation for intensely close reading of Victorian literature, John Sutherland explores the Brontës' lives, their characters, their novels and poems, and the ways in which we interpret them today -- and above all he digs out those unexpected nuggets of fact that illuminate their perennially popular works.

<p>For fans old and new, this is a fascinating tour through Charles Dickens's novels in the hands of a master critic and interpreter of his work. Oliver Twist ... Great Expectations ... David Copperfield &#8211; all contain riotous fictional worlds that still live and breathe for readers today. But how much do we really know about the dazzling imagination that brought this all into being? To celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Dickens in 2012, Victorian literature expert John Sutherland has created a gloriously wide-ranging alphabetical companion to Dickens's novels, excavating the hidden links between his characters, themes, and preoccupations, and the minutiae of his endlessly inventive wordplay. Covering Baby Farming, Bastards, Cannibalism, Christmas, Darwin, Fog, Gruel, London, Micawberomics, Murder, Pubs, Punishment, Smells, Spontaneous Combustion and Zoo Horrors to name but a few, Sutherland gives us a uniquely personal guide to the greatest novelist England has ever...

Adulterous love, marital love, virginal love, religious devotion, agape, lust, eros: there are an infinite variety of meanings that can be packed into the four letters that spell love, and writers of fiction have been trying for centuries to plumb its depths. We turn to literature in large part to learn what love is and what it should be, and readers of *The Oxford Book of English Love Stories* will find consolation and inspiration in equal measure from some of the sharpest observers of this most essential human emotion. From the bittersweet ending of Trollope's ultra-Trollopian "The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne;" to the intricate rituals of courtship in Sylvia Plath's "Stone Boy with Dolphin;" to Paul Theroux's sardonic study of innocence in "An English Unofficial Rose," this collection is a looking glass into the many moods of love. Editor John Sutherland has searched two centuries of English literature to select twenty-eight wholly original works, choosing those that best represent the rich and varied nature of love itself. Readers will find stories by Mary Shelley, W. M. Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and many others, all of which explore the infinite varieties of love and its shifting rules. Indeed, the rules of the game of love tend to change with every new set of players and with each generation. In D.H. Lawrence's "Samson and Delilah," the game is violent and fraught with physical injury. In Katherine Mansfield's "Something Childish but very Natural," love is more reminiscent of two people playing chess blindfolded. And, in Joyce Cary's "The Tunnel," it seems that the lovers cannot, tantalizingly, even get themselves on to the same playing field. Bittersweet endings, ironic angles on traditional platitudes, and other surprises make the insights of writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, W. Somerset Maugham, or V. S. Pritchett always fresh and challenging. Simple or sophisticated, sometimes hilarious and often very moving, *The Oxford Book of* *English Love Stories* brings a delightful perspective to the mysteries of love. ### Review "Sophisticated and simple, sometimes comic and often moving."-- *Women's Weekly* "Love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and varied forms --virginal love, adulterous love, gay love, and so on, are robustly portrayed in a collection which also succeeds in showing how the twenty-eight authors included, approach their theme according to both the social and literary conventions of the their day."--Helen Rennie, *Oxford Times* ### About the Author *About the Editor:* **John Sutherland** , Professor of English at University College, London, has edited numerous World's Classics. He is Associate General-Editor of the *Oxford Popular Fiction* series, and is currently editing *The Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction*.

SUMMARY: The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest "Sensation Novel." Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. This new critical edition is the first to use the original manuscript of the novel. John Sutherland examines Collins's contribution to Victorian fiction, traces his practices as a creator of plot, and provides a chronology of the novel's complicated events. <p><em>The Woman in White</em> famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his "charming" friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. </p> <p>Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, <em>The Woman in White</em> is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism. </p> <p>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.</p> <div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Josephine Bailey and Simon Prebble turn in stellar performances of Collins's classic, commonly regarded as the world's first mystery novel. Late one night, on the way to his new post, art teacher Walter Hartright encounters a ghostly woman dressed all in white, tending to a grave. The next day, he meets his new pupils, Laura Fairlie and her half-sister, Marian, and discovers that the sisters have mysterious ties to the woman in white. For a story told by a sequence of first-person narrators, Bailey and Prebble provide well-paced, alternating readings: Prebble's Hartright is steady, even-keeled, and sensitive; his Marian is bright and clear and blunt. Bailey's Laura is equally well rendered: kind and young, sad and sweet. The voices both narrators provide the host of other characters—including the hot-tempered Sir Percival Glyde and the devious Count Fosco—are attended with equal imagination and skill. A must-listen for mystery lovers. (Jan.) <br>(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>Novel by Wilkie Collins, published serially in All the Year Round (November 1859-July 1860) and in book form in 1860. Noted for its suspenseful plot and unique characterization, the successful novel brought Collins great fame; he adapted it into a play in 1871. This dramatic tale, inspired by an actual criminal case, is told through multiple narrators. Frederick Fairlie, a wealthy hypochondriac, hires virtuous Walter Hartright to tutor his beautiful niece and heiress, Laura, and her homely, courageous half-sister, Marian Halcombe. Although Hartright and Laura fall in love, she honors her late father's wish that she marry Sir Percival Glyde, a villain who plans to steal her inheritance. Glyde is assisted by sinister Count Fosco, a cultured, corpulent Italian who became the archetype of subsequent villains in crime novels. Their plot is threatened by Anne Catherick, a mysterious fugitive from a mental asylum who dresses in white, resembles Laura, and knows the secret of Glyde's illegitimate birth. Through the perseverance of Hartright and Marian, Glyde and Fosco are defeated and killed, allowing Hartright to marry Laura. -- <em>The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature</em></p></div>