Literature in our lives : talking about texts from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman Introduction 1. The myth of the Fall and its impact: Pullman Lewis and others 2. Claribels story: a few thoughts on gender race and colonialism in The Tempest 3. Wuthering Heights: myth and the wounds of loss 4. Becketts Waiting for Godot: transforming lives 5. Great Expectations: intertextualities endings and life after plot 6. Emily Dickinson: And then the windows failed 7. Emma: rhetoric irony and the readers assault course 8. Dorian Gray: queering the text 9. The Fallen Woman: Emma Bovary and (many) others 10. Two transgressive American women: Kate Chopin Charlotte Perkins Gilman 11. Hamlet Lear: realism modernism 12. John Keats: three (or is it two) poems and thoughts on late style 13. Republicanism regicide and The Musgrave Ritual 14. Jean Rhys: her texts from the 1930s 15. Twelfth Night: Dream Gift 16. Please read Proust 17. Paradise Lost: radical politics gender and education This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by the award winning teacher Richard Jacobs who has been working with students for forty years. This is a book aimed at students starting their studies or more experienced and all lovers of literature and devoted to the idea that reading thinking about and writing or talking about literature involves us all personally that texts talk to us intimately and urgently and invite us to talk back and that literature intervenes in our lives and changes them. These lectures discuss in an open but richly informed way a wide range of texts that are regularly studied and enjoyed and they model what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature how the study of literature can be life changing perhaps even with the effect of changing the lives of readers of this remarkable book