Lexington Books
Pages: 210
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅛
978-1-4985-6371-0 • Hardback • April 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-4985-6372-7 • eBook • April 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
Kevin R. West is professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University.
Acknowledgments
Prologue: “Deadly Signs”
Chapter One: Toward a Taxonomy of Dangerous Texts; or, the Hazards of Classification
Chapter Two: The Dangers of Romantic Reading
Chapter Three: Just Reading or Reading Into? Possibilities of Overreading
Chapter Four: The Bible as a Dangerous Text (?)
Conclusion: Reading and the Effect of Death
Ironic Epilogue: On the Dangers of Not Reading
Bibliography
The ensuing struggle for democracy requires courageous scholars and writers to speak truth and for publishers to deliver their message to the public. Reading and Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History is an essential tool in democracy's fragile arsenal with which to contest denuded and unsavory forms of thought emerging in our time. Books like this one might just save us from sinking into a new dark age.
— Creston Davis, The Global Center for Advanced Studies
Kevin R. West turns the common notion of finding comfort in reading a book on its head. His elegant and accessible examination of dangerous reading spans an impressive range of genres, time periods, and countries. This thought-provoking study is supported by impeccable research and provides an innovative approach to world literature.
— Anthony J. Grubbs, Michigan State University
In Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading: Textual Dangers, Kevin R. West demonstrates that foremost among the pleasures of the text are the dangers it poses—including both dangers to the reader's own inclinations and susceptibilities and to the reigning social order. Drawing from an encyclopedic range of authors (from Homer and Rousseau to Eco and Hemingway) and bounding across a range of genres (from memoir to sci-fi to the Bible), West explores why reading, quite possibly evolution's greatest gift to human beings, has so continuously terrified us. Whether a book wreaks literal magic and mayhem or incites more philosophical fears about how language casts a spell, storytellers and authorities alike demonstrate persistent worries over the threat of narrative. As a worthy successor to Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading makes a fine argument for why so many literary authors across the centuries depict texts as the runes by which we divine the power of human perception.
— Kirk Curnutt, Executive Director, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society