The Joys of Teaching Literature, started in September 2010 and with a Spanish version since July 2021, is a blog for ranting and raving about teaching and researching English Literature, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies, and other aspects of the Anglophone world. I publish a post once a week, usually on Monday. Please, download the yearly volumes for free or read the volume collecting some of the entries (Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of English Literature, 2023). The comments option is not available, sorry, but you may contact me through my e-mail address, Sara.Martin@uab.cat. The contents of this blog are protected by a type 4 Creative Common License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)).

  • 3,000 BOOKS: (HALF) A LIFE-TIME OF READING

    (Back to writing, a bit more relaxed after a well-deserved holiday… spent ‘doing a Wordsworth,’ that is, enjoying the beauties of the mountains, those of the Pyrenees). Today’s topic is keeping track of reading –here we go. I started keeping a record of the books I read, out of my own initiative, back in 1980…

  • ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO: WOMEN, FREEDOM AND WWI

    My colleagues David Owen and Cristina Pividori are editing a volume on WWI and I was commissioned to write a piece on two middle-brow best-selling novels, Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922) and Wilfrid Ewart’s The Way of Revelation (1921). I’m writing on men’s friendship, considering the idea of whether WWI forms a divide after which…

  • THE PROBLEM OF AVILABILITY: MAKING RESEARCH ACCESSIBLE (OR NOT…)

    Samuel sends in a comment which includes a question: “Surely if the government is sponsoring academics, they should want the results of their hard work to be available to a much wider audience?” He also writes that “There’s been a lot of good work done to make journals available to at least current university students,…

  • PUBLISHING IN SLOW MOTION (AND OTHER LIMITS TO PUBLICATION)

    Last summer 2013 I managed to finish two articles I’d been working on for a long time. One is called “Rewriting the American Astronaut from a Cross-cultural Perspective: Michael Lopez-Alegria in Manuel Huerga’s documentary film Son and Moon (2009)” and the other’s title is “A Demolition Job: Scottish Masculinity and the Failure of the Utopian…

  • ‘HEAVILY FICTIONALISED’: THE SADISTIC TREATMENT OF ARTEMISIA IN 300, RISE OF AN EMPIRE

    When I saw Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006), based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, I knew at once that was a film I would write about –infuriating but original, ridiculous but deliciously camp, dangerous in its exaltation of laddism but key to understand today’s patriarchal backlash. I did write about it, criticising its failure…