The Open Book: Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers

Product Description
The Open Book is a provocative study of literary influence at work in English writing from Hardy to Woolf. Jensen reimagines the links between text and context as she endeavors to historicize literary influence, by taking Bloomian 'anxiety' and Kristevan 'intertextuality' into fields of actual history and biography. Jensen both borrows from and deconstructs the ideas of these theorists as she reads the texts of Hardy, Stephen, Woolf, Mansfield, and Middleton Murry. By doing so, The Open Book offers a fresh and pragmatic opening onto the relation between personal, cultural and institutional history on the one hand, and literary history on the other.
Review
'The Open Book...would certainly make a valuable addition to any university library. The ideas evinced, though, are unusual and thought- provoking.' - Times Literary Supplement
'This is an academic book but, unlike many other academic books nowadays, it is a pleasure to read.' - John Mepham, Virginia Woolf Bulletin
About the Author
MARGARET M. JENSEN is a lecturer on nineteenth and twentieth century British Fiction and Kingston University. She is currently working on her first novel.