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)).

  • VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN’S MAN AND THE (VEXED) QUESTION OF THE POST-HUMAN

    These days I’m teaching Frankenstein (1818, 1831) and writing about one of its thousands of descendants, Richard K. Morgan’s Thin Air (2018). As science and technology advance and speculative fiction gets closer to everyday life (or perhaps the other way around), writers imagine creatures that would have baffled Mary Shelley. The newer creations are some…

  • CULTURAL STUDIES REVISITED: A BITTERSWET FEELING

    I have spent a good portion of my morning today working on a talk I’m giving next month at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. The topic is Cultural Studies, specifically my point of view on their evolution in Spain. As happens, I was invited ten years ago to lecture on this very same topic…

  • JOHN KEATS: HERITAGE, LEGACY, AND BOHEMIAN POVERTY

    Obsessing about how each of the great six male Romantic poets made a living is not the most orthodox way to approach them. It is now John Keats’s turn and, once more, this is, I think, a very relevant issue. I’ll begin, then, by mentioning Keats’s guardian Richard Abbey, the man who put in charge…

  • PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: THANKS TO MARY’S LOVE

    The title of my post today is intended to be ambiguous: I mean to say that it is thanks to the love of his wife Mary that Percy Shelley is celebrated as a major poet, and that both he and all poetry readers must thank her for her efforts. As she wrote, ‘He died, and…

  • LORD BYRON: APPROACHING DECANONIZATION

    In a hilarious moment of the two-part documentary The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron (2009) presenter Rupert Everett discusses with Donatella Versace–as they wait for her butler to announce dinner at her own luxury Milan home–whether Byron (1788-1824) was really as handsome as so many contemporaneous testimonials claim. At this point, Everett has already seen…