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French Literature
Legal Fictions
Literary Theory
Narrative Theory
Prison Writing
Psychoanalytic Criticism
The Novel
Theories of Reading
Product details
- ISBN 9781399538381
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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For many decades Peter Brooks’s critical writing has been a force of illumination and inspiration for readers of many kinds, with memorable books that continue to generate new thinking. Reading for the Plot was perhaps the best known of these until Brooks published Seduced by Story (2022), a provocative calling out of the now ubiquitous cultural stress on ‘stories’ of all and any kind.
The mini-essays in this volume build on the diverse strands of Brooks’s work in their own ways, to demonstrate –and celebrate—its significance for critical thinking across a range of different disciplinary fields and institutional settings: in literary history and narrative theory; in psychoanalytic and legal studies; through interdisciplinary initiatives at Yale. There are also two longer essays by Peter Brooks himself, including one on his experience of prison teaching.
Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at University College London. Most recently, she is the author of Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024) and Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025).
