The Importance of Place

By Jennifer Burek Pierce Place is central to John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and to the community of readers who love his work.  In both the novel and the movie versions of this story, visually distinctive places anchor…

Souvenirs of the Victorian Global Bookshelf

by Alexander Bubb It began with a case of mistaken identity. In 2016 I was growing deeply interested in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of short, pithy, epigrammatic poems translated from Persian by the Victorian man of letters…

Theologies of Reading

By Laura McCormick Kilbride, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, and Simone Kotva Is reading a theological activity? This is a question which only invites further questions. How a person responds to it will reveal as much about their presuppositions and their training…

The Library of Comfort

by Jürgen Pieters The painting on my new book’s cover was made by the Viennese artist Friedrich Frotzel (1898-1971). Its title – ‘The Old Bookcase’ – makes it even more appropriate. The library of comfort, as I make clear in…

Reading the War on Terror in Moroccan Picture Books

By Sara Austin and Ann Wainscott We met at New Faculty Orientation in 2018. Sara was seated across a large round table from me, and during introductions she mentioned that she was a scholar of children’s literature. I immediately mentioned…

Remembering Sarah Kofman in the 2020s?

By Jacob Bates-Firth Sarah Kofman and the Relief of Philosophy (ed. Bates-Firth and McKeane) is out now as a special issue of Paragraph, 44:1 (March 2021) and concurrently in book form with Edinburgh University Press. Backdrop When John and I began to…

Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions

A special issue of journal, Paragraph, guest edited by Elissa Marder, creatively re-imagines Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking 1977 volume of Yale French Studies (Nos 55/56), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, in which Felman opened up the question of…

Which book brings a smile to your face?

Here at Edinburgh University Press it’s safe to say that we love books. And we love books that make us feel happy! Therefore, what better way to celebrate International Day of Happiness than to tell you which books bring a…

Edward Thomas, courtesy Edward Thomas Fellowship

War Damage: Four Poets of the First World War

“what are the implications of [war damage] for our understanding of literary works which themselves engage with the theme of the damage inflicted by war?” Richard Price answers this as he considers how poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas…