Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- 1. The myth of the Fall and its impact: Pullman, Lewis and others -- 2. Claribel's story: a few thoughts on gender, race and colonialism in The Tempest -- 3. Wuthering Heights: myth and the wounds of loss -- 4. Beckett's Waiting for Godot: transforming lives -- 5. Great Expectations: intertextualities, endings and life after plot -- 6. Emily Dickinson: 'And then the windows failed' -- 7. Emma: rhetoric, irony and the reader's assault course -- 8. Dorian Gray: 'queering' the text -- 9. The Fallen Woman: Emma Bovary and (many) others -- 10. Two transgressive American women: Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- 11. Hamlet / Lear: realism / modernism -- 12. John Keats: three (or is it two?) poems and thoughts on 'late style' -- 13. Republicanism, regicide and 'The Musgrave Ritual' -- 14. Jean Rhys: her texts from the 1930s -- 15. Twelfth Night: Dream-Gift -- 16. Please read Proust -- 17. Paradise Lost: radical politics, gender and education

"This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular, frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by the award-winning teacher Richard Jacobs, who has been working with students for forty years. This is a book aimed at students, starting their studies or more experienced, and all lovers of literature and devoted to the idea that reading, thinking about, and writing or talking about literature involves us all personally, that texts talk to us intimately and urgently and invite us to talk back, and that literature intervenes in our lives and changes them. These lectures discuss, in an open but richly informed way, a wide range of texts that are regularly studied and enjoyed and they model what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature, how the study of literature can be life-changing - perhaps even with the effect of changing the lives of readers of this remarkable book"-- Provided by publisher

In English text.