Home Cyanotype of books from the Smithsonian

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Cyanotype of books from the Smithsonian

By Thomas Smillie, 1890. See more Photographs >

Recent Faculty Books

Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality
Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality
Don Bialostosky
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Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of American and Spanish Literatures
Gayle Rogers
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Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South
Shalini Puri
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Caribbean Military Encounters
Shalini Puri
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How to Play a Poem
Don Bialostosky
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Schooling New Media
Tyler Bickford
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The Critics and the Prioress: Criticism, Antisemitism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale
Hannah Johnson

I have always imagined Paradise will be a kind of library.

Borges

Literature is news that stays news.

Pound

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

Stendhal
I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s Monster

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway

’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson

Every allegedly great age is an age of translations.

Pound

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Rushdie

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Acceptance Speech

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

Eliot

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

Thoreau

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Emily Dickinson

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden

Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race! Nations are Destroy’d,
or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry Painting and Music,
are Destroy’d or Flourish!

Blake

On or about December 1910, human character changed.

Woolf

It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Austen

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
of prancing Poetry

Emily Dickinson

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