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 from https://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328, 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)).

  • GILBERT & HEATHCLIFF: BROTHERS (AND BRONTË SISTERS)

    Many critics have already suggested that the unfortunate Branwell Brontë provided the main inspiration for his sister Anne’s self-destructive Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. He seems to have been also Emily’s bleak muse for the degraded Hindley Earnshaw, Cathy’s brother. In both cases, Arthur’s and Hindley’s, they are contrasted with a stronger…

  • POST OLIVER TWIST: NOT THE BEST CHOICE BUT A GOOD CHOICE NONETHELESS

    Having taught several times Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations I had serious doubts that Oliver Twist would be a satisfying text to teach, being, as it clearly is, inferior to this other novel. Why change the syllabus, then? The usual: my colleagues’ worries that Great Expectations is too hard to grasp for second-year students (yes, a…

  • JEREMY PAXMAN’S THE VICTORIANS: THE VICTORY OF THE PHILISTINES?

    A dear friend gave me as a present Jeremy Paxman’s book The Victorians: Britain through the Paintings of the Age (2009), a very refreshing volume which is by no means a history of Victorian painting but a look at the Victorian age through its pictorial obsessions. The volume, it turns out, is a tie-in of…

  • COUPLE-RELATED VIOLENCE: THE MATTER OF SEMANTICS

    I’ve been mulling this matter over since attending CIME 2011 last week. In that conference the expressions ‘domestic violence,’ ‘sexist violence,’ ‘gendered or gender-related violence’ and ‘male chauvinist violence’ were bandied about without much agreement on what this all-pervading type of violence should be called. I would certainly not call it a ‘phenomenon,’ as the…

  • AMONG MEN…: A CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH AND ACTIVISM ABOUT MASCULINITIES

    I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog entry for some time, as my expectations for CIME 2011, the Ibero-American Conference on Masculinities and Equity, were high. They have been fulfilled in that, to my great pleasure and relief, I’ve learned that there are many men fighting patriarchy with all their might (see www.homesigualitaris.cat for…