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)).

  • JANE AUSTEN FOR BOYS?: ENJOYING MALE INTIMACY IN THE AUBREY-MATURIN SERIES BY PATRICK O’BRIAN

    An important function of film adaptations is calling the attention of potential readers to works they would have missed otherwise. I am one of the many readers who became familiarized with the world of the Aubrey-Maturin series by English writer Patrick O’Brian thanks to Peter Weir’s excellent film Master and Commander: The Far Side of…

  • FROM MECANOSCRIT TO TYPESCRIPT: TRANSLATING PEDROLO (AND THE QUIRKS OF INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL COMMUNICATION)

    Allow me to take Manuel de Pedrolo (1918-1990) as the centre of the argumentation I want to develop here. Pedrolo is a key author of Catalan literature, to which he contributed about 100 works in all genres (poetry, drama, novel, journalism) and also his translations of first-rank international work by American and European novelists. He…

  • TYPESCRIPT OF THE SECOND ORIGIN: THE MASTERPIECE OF CATALAN SCIENCE FICTION

    [Please, note: This is the prologue I have written for the trilingual edition of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit del segon origen (1974). The text explains why and how it has been produced.] When I joined the team in charge of organizing the Barcelona Eurocon, back in the autumn of 2015, little could I imagine that…

  • THE BODY AND THE BODIES: AGAINST UNIVERSALISM (IN AFFECT THEORY AND IN HORROR FILM)

    I have read with great pleasure Xavier Aldana Reyes’s new volume, Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (Routledge). I’m very proud to see how he is fast progressing into being a truly first-rank academic, as it is always delightful for a teacher to see how someone who used to sit in…

  • THE INCREDIBLY SHRINKING UNITED KINGDOM: ON BREXIT

    This is a time-capsule post, of the kind that gets written with the author expecting to check in five-years time what really happened. Like many people all over the world–as shown by the instantaneous collapse of the stock market–I expected Britons to have voted in favour of staying in the European Union. This is a…