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)).

  • (DON) JUANITO SANTA CRUZ: THE SEDUCER AS MINOR CHARACTER IN FORTUNATA Y JACINTA

    In this summer of very long books, I have re-read with great pleasure Benito Pérez Galdós’s masterpiece Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas (1887), a novel certainly far superior to Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, but still not hailed as the universal classic it should be. Blame for this a certain prejudice against Spanish literature and…

  • (DON) JUANITO SANTA CRUZ: EL SEDUCTOR COMO PERSONAJE SECUNDARIO EN FORTUNATA Y JACINTA

    En este verano de libros larguísimos, he releído con mucho gusto la obra maestra de Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas (1887), una novela ciertamente muy superior a Anna Karenina de Tolstoi, pero todavía no reconocida como un clásico universal, tal como debería.             Galdós, admirador de Dickens, está posiblemente más…

  •  THE MEANING OF ‘WORK’: REFLECTIONS ON LABOUR

    Last week I confessed my gradual loss of enthusiasm over Anna Karenina, a novel whose last sections I mostly skipped. This week I confess that I had a similar problem with Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). This is a collection…

  • EL SIGNIFICADO DE ‘TRABAJO’: REFLEXIONES SOBRE EL EMPLEO

    La semana pasada confesé mi paulatina pérdida de entusiasmo por Anna Karenina, una novela cuyas últimas secciones me salté en su mayoría. Esta semana confieso que tuve un problema similar con Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) de Studs Terkel. Se trata de…

  • LEGAL FICTIONS OF THE 19TH CENTURY: THE CASE OF ANNA KARENINA

    I must confess my total and utter failure to enjoy Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina (serialized 1875-1877 and printed in a single volume in 1878). I started with the customary patience I use when reading very long texts (1096 pages in my edition, the excellent 2000 translation by husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa…