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)).

  • REDEFINING GOTHIC FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

    [NOTE: this post is available in Spanish at https://blogs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/es/] There is no volume called An Introduction to Gothic. The closest title is Nick Groom’s The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (2012), though it could be said that the real introduction to Gothic was David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980, expanded into two volumes 1994…

  • PENSANDO DE NUEVO EN WILLY WONKA: EL VILLANO ‘DISFRUTABLE’

    Mi brillante estudiante Pol Vinyeta ha escrito una excelente disertación de licenciatura sobre uno de los libros más populares de Roald Dahl con el título “Don’t Trust the Candy Man: A Reading of Willy Wonka’s Enjoyable Villainy in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Its Film Adaptations”. Pol eligió este tema porque parecía que Matilda…

  • RETHINKING WILLY WONKA: ENJOYABLE VILLAINY

    [NOTE: this post is available in Spanish at https://blogs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/es/] My brilliant student Pol Vinyeta has written an excellent BA dissertation on one of Roald Dahl’s most popular books with the title “Don’t Trust the Candy Man: A Reading of Willy Wonka’s Enjoyable Villainy in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Its Film Adaptations”. Pol chose…

  • THE END OF ENGLISH LITERATURE DEGREES?: NO, BUT GET READY FOR CHANGES

    This post is inspired by two articles, one in The Guardian and one in The Critic, which discuss the possible end of the degrees in English language and Literature in England if things continue downhill, as they seem to be going. Before I start discussing in more detail the situation and the arguments, allow me…

  • BEING THE OTHER, THE OTHER BEING: MASCULINE INSECURITIES IN MATTHEW HAIG’S THE HUMANS AND BLAKE CROUCH’S DARK MATTER

    This is the ten-minute talk I gave last week at the international conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, of which I spoke in my last post. Since we had been given such a short time, I used no secondary sources and focused directly on the two novels I discuss. I was a bit nervous…