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)).

  • FREEING RESEARCH FROM THE MARKET: THE BRITISH CASE (AND CHINA MIÉVILLE)

    A colleague emailed me back in July yet another article on this new phenomenon I’ve been discussing here in fits and starts: the demand that research be freed from the market. This time it was the turn of The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21559317) to announce that “Academic journals face a radical shake-up.” The main arguments are the…

  • HOW MANY LAYERS TO THIS CAKE?: CONSIDERING SF WRITERS

    I am spending a good deal of my holidays reading SF, this time not so much at random and for pleasure but, rather, trying to update my (always tottering…) knowledge of the field in a more systematic fashion. Like any other contemporary genre, SF is fast evolving and it’s very hard to grasp which new…

  • 1844 AND 1902, OR BETWEEN ENGELS AND LONDON: WHAT GOOD IS CAPITALISM?

    NOTE: This post was written on 26 July Preparing for my Victorian Literature subject next semester –in particular for Oliver Twist– I read back-to-back Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (published 1845 in German, 1887 in English) and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1902). Each is a…

  • A FORGOTTEN BEST-SELLER: MARIE CORELLI’S THE SORROWS OF SATAN (1895)

    Whether you’re interested in Victorian Literature, Gothic fiction or the material aspects of Literature (i.e. the market), Marie Corelli’s name is sure to surface in your reading. I’m interested in these three issues and so, sooner or later, I was bound to read her best-selling novel The Sorrows of Satan (1895). Corelli (née Minnie Mackay)…

  • JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, 2012, (WITH ZOMBIES)

    I read Daniel Defoe’s ultra-realistic fake diary Journal of the Plague Year (1722) with great pleasure a few weeks ago. I was intending to devote the whole post today to Defoe’s novel but reality insists on intruding, this form in the shape of a new pay cut (civil servants will not receive the Christmas pay…