At this present juncture in the history of literature, many critics fear the literary word has been devalued by the twin forces of electronic technology and critical theory. Even so, the field of literature is not without resources to revivify itself as the emergence of new holistic approaches to literature testify. The interdisciplinary influence of the sciences, for instance, opens a window f...

In 2013, Goodreads, a social media Website for book lovers, announced policy changes that included the deletion of reviews that discuss an author’s behavior. These changes occurred after a series of author/reviewer incidents in 2012 and 2013. This article presents a case study of one of those incidents in 2012, when a Goodreads reviewer wrote a negative review of a novel, the author and agent r...

This article addresses to what extent literary critics in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany have drawn ethnic boundaries in their reviews of ethnic minority writers between 1983 and 2009 and to what extent these boundaries have changed in the course of ethnic minority writers’ careers and across time? By analyzing newspaper reviews, we find that American reviewers less often mentio...

In his article "The Indirect Path to the Literary Canon Exemplified by Shelley's Frankenstein" David Fishelov examines the indirect path of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the literary canon. Fishelov offers a multi-dimensional model for describing the dynamic process of acquiring, maintaining, and changing canonical status. The model emphasizes the important role played by artistic dialogues an...

Literary reading has been a topic of inquiry among scholars of literature and educationalists for nearly three quarters of a century (Richards, 1929; Rosenblatt, 1937). Among empirical researchers, in contrast, attention to literature is quite recent, with most studies having been carried out only over the last 20 years. The literary field is fraught with controversy, however. Basic differences...

Applied literature is a term that is the outcome of a need to put literature to tangible uses in the “real” world. A medical practitioner looking for a definition of life, for instance, finds literature a useful source for the answer. With paradigm shifts in scientific studies, interdisciplinarity has been a method to overcome the alienations that resulted from the isolation of disciplines from...

There were two forms of nativism1 during the Tokugawa period. The first was literary in orientation. Literary nativists undertook exhaustive and comprehensive studies of Japan’s classical literature, and both poetry and prose works were central to their scholarship. An array of luminary intellects mostly from the eighteenth century made their mark on this form of nativism, including Keichū (164...

This article describes a joint research work between Monash University and the University of Alicante, where software originally meant for plagiarism and copy detection in academic works is successfully applied to perform comparative analysis of di erent editions of literary works. The experiments were performed with Spanish texts from the Miguel de Cervantes digital library. The results have p...

This article addresses the question whether and how literary documents can be used to further our understanding of a number of key issues on the agenda of the philosophy of biology such as "complexity" and "reductionism". Kant already granted a certain respectability to aesthetical experiences of nature in his third Critique. Subsequently, the philosophical movement known as phenomenology often...