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)).

  • NO MEAN CITY: RECONSIDERING CLASS

    The volume that interests me today is a novel: No Mean City (1935), ‘the classic novel of the Glasgow slum underworld’ as the cover of the Corgi edition announces. Apparently, this novel has its origins in the short stories written by Gorbals unemployed baker Alexander McArthur. They were polished for publication by journalist H. Kingsley…

  • ADOLESCENCE REVISITED, 1800 TO 2019

    I’m in the middle of reading Jon Savage’s Teenager (2007), a study of how youth was socially constructed between 1875 and 1945 in the USA, the UK, and some other European countries. We usually assume that ‘teenager’ appeared in Western culture in the 1950s but the first thing Savage’s volume teaches is that this word…

  • REVISITING FRANKENSTEIN: A FEW NOTES ON DOMESTICITY, THE CYBORG AND THE POST-HUMAN

    I will soon start teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and although the best time to revisit this classic was last year–the bicentennial anniversary of its original publication–2019 is also a good moment to re-read it, for it is the year when Ridley Scott set his masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982). Both novel and film are closely connected,…

  • FICTIONS WE LIVE BY: ORGANIZED CRIME, THE BANAL SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT, AND PATRIARCHY

    I have just read two excellent volumes on organized crime in the UK, one by Alan Wright (Organised Crime: Concepts, Cases, Controls, 2006) and the other by Dick Hobbs (Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK, 2013). Reading the last novel by Ian Rankin in the long John Rebus series, In a House of…

  • ALL THAT RESENTMENT: UNIVERSITY TEACHERS AND SPANISH SOCIETY

    My post today refers mainly to the article in El País, “La Universidad afronta la salida del 50% de sus catedráticos en siete años” (https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/01/09/actualidad/1547044018_002135.html). As it is habitual in the Spanish media, El País mistakes ‘catedráticos’ (i.e. full professors) for tenured teachers (i.e. those with positions as civil servants until they retire, but not…