In 2013, Goodreads, a social media Website for book lovers, announced policy changes that included the deletion of reviews that discuss an author’s behavior. These changes occurred after a series of author/reviewer incidents in 2012 and 2013. This article presents a case study of one of those incidents in 2012, when a Goodreads reviewer wrote a negative review of a novel, the author and agent r...

In his article "The Indirect Path to the Literary Canon Exemplified by Shelley's Frankenstein" David Fishelov examines the indirect path of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the literary canon. Fishelov offers a multi-dimensional model for describing the dynamic process of acquiring, maintaining, and changing canonical status. The model emphasizes the important role played by artistic dialogues an...

Literary reading has been a topic of inquiry among scholars of literature and educationalists for nearly three quarters of a century (Richards, 1929; Rosenblatt, 1937). Among empirical researchers, in contrast, attention to literature is quite recent, with most studies having been carried out only over the last 20 years. The literary field is fraught with controversy, however. Basic differences...

This article addresses the question whether and how literary documents can be used to further our understanding of a number of key issues on the agenda of the philosophy of biology such as "complexity" and "reductionism". Kant already granted a certain respectability to aesthetical experiences of nature in his third Critique. Subsequently, the philosophical movement known as phenomenology often...

The creators of the Hindu scriptures known as the Brahmaand Bhāgavatapurāṇas lavished a great amount of descriptive detail on mythical and ‘mythologised’ places where important discourses were enunciated: the Naimiṣa forest, Mt Meru, Kurukṣetra, and Ānanda on the banks of the Ganges. At first glance this might appear to be idle expression of literary virtuosity, but I suggest that this careful ...

This article describes a joint research work between Monash University and the University of Alicante, where software originally meant for plagiarism and copy detection in academic works is successfully applied to perform comparative analysis of di erent editions of literary works. The experiments were performed with Spanish texts from the Miguel de Cervantes digital library. The results have p...

There were two forms of nativism1 during the Tokugawa period. The first was literary in orientation. Literary nativists undertook exhaustive and comprehensive studies of Japan’s classical literature, and both poetry and prose works were central to their scholarship. An array of luminary intellects mostly from the eighteenth century made their mark on this form of nativism, including Keichū (164...

The primary focus of literature’s first decade as part of the formal curriculum of some American medical schools (1972–81) was on teaching literary works to help develop students’ capacity for empathy, to enhance their skills in interpretation, and to complement the teaching of traditional medical ethics. These early concerns of literature and medicine have been discussed in the eight previous ...