50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know Hardcover – 6 Jan. 2010

As an enthusiastic English teacher, linguist and lover of the language, I generally find this kind of book utterly fascinating and enjoyable to read; and even though I don't always learn anything entirely new, it's always good to find a different angle on a complex or controversial litcrit concept. This new text book has left me wanting and quite frustrated. The explanations are simply far too short or even too obscure themselves to be clear; I'm left sometimes wondering even whether the author really "gets it" but that is unlikely given his status.It's the first time I've ever considered returning a book to Amazon. If I'd looked at it first, its weaknesses would have been quickly clear and would prevented me buying it. There are many far clearer guides available, even if less stylish and modern in design and style. If you are needing to dip your toes in the often murky waters of lit crit for A level or university, or are a general reader keen on such fascinating things, I do feel that this guide is unlikely to be very useful and might even make you feel rather belittled and confused, needlessly and wrongly. The explanations are not only too brief, they often, and in my view most importantly, lack clarity.

John Sutherland has taken a complex theme and made it simple to read in 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know (2010).Whether you’re a book worm consuming Virginia Woolf’s superb body of work or just starting to read your first airport page turning novel, Sutherland’s book will help you enjoy reading on a deeper level. He offers fifty different thoughts about what makes literature or what is involved in literature, and writes them in a coherent fashion that can be consumed, remembered and appreciated when next reading. He talks about well know ideas such as “genre”, and travels into less trodden areas of “defamiliarization”, “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” to name only a couple.What makes this non-fiction book so easy to consume is its structure. Each idea consists of only four short pages, each page arranged in the same way: giving a brief overview of the idea, an insight into the history of the idea, a deeper dive into what the idea is, and finally a condensed idea.A nice companion book to Sutherland’s would be John Mullan’s How Novels Work (2006), another simple read talking about literature in a way that is a pleasure to consume.50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know is a pleasant book that talks about important components of literature that is often difficult to understand, and makes them digestible to anyone with a passion for reading. This would be a great first book for someone partaking a literature or writing course, and would benefit any reader.

This was fun to read and might be helpful to a complele beginner. However it is necessarily very superficial and can be annoying - eg the fact that Paul de Man turned out to have been a Nazi doesn't have anything to do with the value or otherwise of structuralism!

JS presents his summaries with such clarity that one wants to keep on turning the pages. The book is a very sound intro to critical literary theory, especially the iconoclastic modern variety. Strongly recommended.

Far too brief, as the writer apparently cares more to target pseudo-intellectuals with his snippets of knowledge surrounding a concept rather discussing the concept itself. Pretentious utter s***. And as an A-Level student, I would've been delighted with a accessible introduction or something rigorously academic either-way. But instead, I'm left very disappointed.

I love John Sutherland's easy-to-read, entertaining style, and this was true to form... lots of interesting ideas, made me go back and revisit several classic books to read them with new insights.

I enjoy these books, full of lots of bit size pieces of information on the topic.

Interesting