CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE

Book ID/图书代码： 11320008B22102

English Summary/英文概要： How much heavier was Thackeray’s brain than Walt Whitman’s? Which novels do American soldiers read? When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? And, while we’re about it, who wrote the first Western, is there any link between asthma and literary genius, and what really happened on Dorothea’s wedding night in Middlemarch?
In Curiosities of Literature, John Sutherland contemplates the full import of questions such as these, and attempts a few answers in a series of essays that are both witty and eclectic. His approach is also unashamedly discursive. An account of the fast-working Mickey Spillane, for example, leads to a consideration of the substances, both legal and illegal, that authors have employed to boost their creative energies. An essay on good and bad handwriting points out in passing that Thackeray could write the Lord’s Prayer on the back of a stamp. As for Mary Shelley, a brief recital of the circumstances in which she wrote Frankenstein stops off to consider what impact the miserable summer weather of 1816 had on the future path of English literature.
Of course, it is debatable whether knowledge of these arcane topics adds to the wisdom of nations, but it does highlight the random pleasures to be found in reading literature and reading about it. As John Sutherland rightly asks, ’Why else read?’

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 假如你是个小说家，笔下的人物失眠了，你会怎么安排呢？让他数绵羊，还是干脆吞两颗速眠安？我想你必须拥有丰富的想象力，才会想到让他像马克•吐温在现实生活中所做的那样，一怒之下跑到浴室的地板去躺着。如果你的想象力更丰富一点，那么也许你能让他效仿诗人艾美•洛威尔：每次到酒店都订五个房间，确保上下左右四个房间全都不发出声音。
所有这些离奇的故事，你都能在约翰•瑟德兰的新书《文学趣谈》中找到。瑟德兰的研究领域是维多利亚时期小说、20世纪文学和出版史，他生于1938年，26岁毕业于英国兰卡斯特大学，旋即成为英国学术重镇爱丁堡大学的讲师，后来从伦敦大学学院荣休，目前是美国加州理工学院的访问教授。在本书之前，他撰写过一系列解读古典小说的著作，如《亨利五世是战犯吗？以及莎士比亚作品中的其他谜团》、《简爱能得到幸福吗？古典小说中更多的谜团》等，都由声誉卓著的牛津大学出版社推出，在英国是市场和社会效益双丰收的作品，而这本《文学趣谈》更是每个文学爱好者的必读书。
这么说，倒并非因为它是那种条分缕析的文学史著作。不，不是的，如果要看有板有眼的学院派文学史读物，你完全可以选择《牛津英语文学手册》（The Oxford Companion to English Literature）。《文学趣谈》的价值在于它提供了众多游离于正式的文学史之外，然而妙趣横生、发人深思的八卦谈资。
... ...(TT)

Awards/获奖情况：’... punctuated by little asides, pert, personal and peppery, seasoning for a warmed-over olla podrida of literary anecdote and authorial arcana.’---The Times, 30 August 2008

About the Author/作者介绍： John Sutherland has been a professor of literature for a long time and in many places. Currently he teaches untechnologically at the California Institute of Technology and is the emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor at UCL. He is the author of numerous books, including the puzzle-collection Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (probably, yes) and the encyclopaedic Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (soon to be reissued in a yet more encyclopaedic form). In recent years, he has written voluminously on a variety of literary and non literary topics in, principally, the Guardian and the Financial Times. His interest in literature has become more curious over the years.
Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and many other publications. His books include a novel, Snatches; a memoir, Stuff; The Dog Allusion: Gods, Pets and How to Be Human; and comic book versions of T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. He smokes and qualifies as the sharpest literary-pictorial satirist of his time.

Format:插图

Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE(到期可授)

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：

原文第一章内容：暂无

手稿：暂无

大纲：暂无