Great reading on those quiet Sunday evenings. The historical perspectives and timelines are the best part; really helps you understand the progression of literature as we know it. The Norton series (western literature) was used often in highschool for me, but I had quite narrow historical perspectives back then; this book has helped change that. I would also recommend Glimpes of World History by J. Nehru. Though it can be at times tedious, it is good accompaniment to this Norton anthology.

This book is very fascinating to read if you're insterested in early Greek and Roman culture. The many stories and translations make the reading easy and fun. I would recommend this book to anyone!

This book has it all! This is the GREATEST collection of books ever printed!

An interesting overview of the variety of different plot structures that operate in the early novel, from Lennox (why not Defoe?) to Austen & Scott. Spacks argues that plots reflect a variety of different cultural tensions of the times, all of which are driven by varieties of "desires" or ambitions for different kinds of power.

Free of jargon, and Spacks helps you out with useful summaries if you haven't read the specific novels she's discussing.

This is not the entire Female Spectator (which would be very long indeed, and much more pricey). Instead, it is an affordable, carefully chosen selection from Eliza Haywood's _Female Spectator_ (a magazine-like publication that ran for several years). The introduction is top-notch. I own this book and refer to it often. This is a great book to read a little at a time. It gives wonderful insight into issues of 18th-century life for women (marriage, manners, and morals). I highly recommend it.

Sounds exciting, but actually, well, boring, mostly because the author fails to distinguish between two very different claims: first, that boredom, the state of mind, didn't exist until recently, and second, that it wasn't talked about much until recently. The first claim would be exciting and bizarre, but the argument at most supports the second.

After researching the topic of chronic boredom myself for the past four years it was gratifying to finally come accross a text that dealt with the problem from the perspective of women writers, thinkers and culture critics from the Enlightenment on. The great literary text on the topic by Reinhard Kuhn 'The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature' did not deal with much of the material here covered by Spacks - though it dealt with just about everything else associated with the topic. Spacks' treatment of the topic mixes analysis of high literary texts with analysis of other cultural discourses often ignored by the traditional modernist culture critic. The consequence is that the voices of hundreds of women - and not merely middle and upperclass women - who have suffered from the malady since the 18th century are heard for the first time. But Spacks' work offers much more to the reader than a female perspective on an old malaise. Her particular emphasis is delivered within the broad tradition of writings on the topic and as such she never loses the overview. Her work provides a scholarly reinterpretation of this much underestimated phenomenon. Chronic boredom, as Healy, Kuhn, Klapp, George Steiner and now Spack's tells us, is one of the great maladies of the twentieth century. At its worst it is one of the most crippling 'maladies of the subject' and clearly, as Spacks seems to suggest, it is often generated by oppressive (subtly or otherwise) social structures. To read Spacks' work alongside Kuhn's is to gain a full overview of a malaise that has been with us since Lucretius and Seneca, but which threatens, more than ever before, to sap personal and social existence of all meaning, and spirit (elan vitale). Spacks' work does not bore, however. Why? Because her tone of high seriousness reveals to the reader something insidious and disturbing about our postmodern social structures.We are confronted in the text with a malign social something masquerading as something innocuous and harmless, mre 'boredom'. Chronic forms of boredom can be vicious and life threatening - both for individuals and for societies. Spacks', more than any other writer on the topic, comes close to linking the problem to terms like 'oppression', 'trauma', 'alienation', disenchantment',' angst' and so on. This her inheritance from feminist and postmodern critical discourses. We are in the mainstream of modernist/psotmodernist discourses on culture and the' crisis of subjectivity'. As TS. Eliot once commented, chronic ennui is a modern form of the great medieval scourge of 'acedia', and acedia, we gleen from the medieval texts, was capable of utterly destroying the psychic and spiritual world's of its victims.

Elegantly written, thought-provoking, abrasive, and immensely informative, Bell-Villada's essay is nonetheless affected by two important flaws: its relative lack of focus, especially toward the end of the book, and its rigid application of a left v. right girdle. Bell-Villada obviously believes that the left is always good and progressive, with the possible exception of Joseph Stalin, whereas the right and the center are innately deficients, both morally and intellectually, for they either call for a return to the past or for a blind defense of the statu quo. The problem here is theoretical. Arguably, the milieu of artists is ill suited for this kind of Manichean mutilation. Many artists, in modern times, have adopted syncretic political dispositions comprising ingredients such as contempt for the statu quo and rejection of dominant values (especially utilitarianism), this leading them either to fascism or to bolchevism, with a great deal of transactions between the two (it is significant that Bell-Villada does not have much to say about Ezra Pound!). Most fascists were also revolutionary and anti statu-quo: in fact, many were attempting to revitalize socialism. Rather than using only "left v. right", Bell-Villada should have added other variables such as "romantic v. enlightenment" and "liberal v. anti-liberal", and use them all with a great deal of flexibility.