TY - BOOK ID - 3467356 TI - Loving literature : a cultural history AU - Lynch, Deidre Shauna AU - University of Chicago Press PY - 2015 SN - 9780226183701 022618370X PB - Chicago ; London University of Chicago Press DB - UniCat KW - English literature KW - Literary criticism KW - English literature. KW - Literatur. KW - Englisch. KW - Achtung. KW - Appreciation. KW - History and criticism. KW - European KW - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:3467356 AB - "Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common--and perhaps the most wounding--is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life--that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or ahistorical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history."--Publisher's Web site. ER -