PENGUIN CLASSICS NEWSLETTER

February/March 2008

"'Vanity, not love, has been my folly' ... Discuss"

The Complete Jane Austen, presented by PBS's Masterpiece Theatre and sponsored by Penguin Classics and the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), continues this season to the delight of all Janeites.

Next up are the film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (February 10, 17, & 24) and Emma (March 23). So catch up and read the books, and if you find yourself talking out loud (and to yourself), be sure to attend one of the "Monday After" discussions hosted by Borders stores in New York and Connecticut. A helpful JASNA member will facilitate the chat.

"How Much Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count the Ways..."

Before Haruki Murakami, there was Natsume Soseki

Making his debut in Penguin Classics this month is the father of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Soseki. We're excited to be publishing Soseki's twentieth-century masterpiece Kusamakura in a stunning new translation, the first in English in more than forty years.
 
As we build our list of classics from around the world, Kusamakura—a lush and enchanting novel set in one of Japan's fabled hot spring resorts—becomes our second modern Japanese classic; our first was Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which we published in our Graphic Classics series a year ago in a brilliant new translation featuring nine stories that had never before been published in English.  It also boasted a wonderful introduction by Haruki Murakami and a dazzling cover by the manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi.
 
Soseki was an important influence on Akutagawa. In fact his influence can be seen throughout the twentieth century, in the work of Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, and all the way up to Haruki Murakami, who has written that Soseki "is read by virtually everyone in Japan who receives a middle-school education," and who counts him as one of his two personal favorites among Japan's greatest writers.

The Bug Is Back!

The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader edited by David Levering Lewis

A Dante for Our Times

A little over a year ago we published the first installment in a landmark new edition of Dante's The Divine Comedy, featuring the Italian on facing pages. Cambridge scholar Robin Kirkpatrick's new translation of Inferno was singled out for exhibiting "a more nuanced sense of the Italian and a more mediated appreciation of the poem's construction than nearly all of his competitors" (The Times). Now we're releasing Kirkpatrick's luminous new translations of Purgatorio and Paradiso, rounding out Dante's awe-inspiring epic. Kirkpatrick's blank-verse translations are the most fluent and sonorous we've encountered, and his amazingly readable and informative introductions and notes will put you on terra firma whether you're making your way through hell, purgatory, or paradise.

Therese Neumann, one of our academic reps out on the field, informed us about Professor Rosemary Johnsen, who designed a master's seminar in English literature around Penguin and its pioneering history of publishing quality paperback books at affordable prices. Johnsen teaches at Governors State University, an upper-division and graduate university located south of Chicago. Studying Penguin was Johnsen's creative tool to teach 20th-century British cultural history and the literary landscape of the mid- and late- 20th century. The students examined different Penguin-published books including Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Orwell's Why I Write and what makes them appropriately "Penguin" books. They even coined expressions like "penguinesque" and "Penguin people" to examine Penguin culture. Featured in the Chicago Tribune on January 17th, Professor Johnsen hopes to teach the course again next year. Stay tuned for more information about how you too can teach a course on Penguin!

Reading the Classics from A to Z: A Literary Makeover
 

Famous Reads

Barack Obama: Moby-Dick

Campus Classic

I enjoy reading The Jungle in the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with my sophomore American Lit survey. The appeal of the novel is obvious, especially with the handsome Charles Burns cover—the trick is getting the students who show up for the legendary gross-out scenes to stick around and consider the larger import of Sinclair's novel. The various available editions help make this point, even as they offer a quick and dirty introduction to print culture and book history. To frame the novel and the introduction to this edition by Eric "Fast Food Nation" Schlosser, I share some excerpts from the Afterword from the 2001 Signet edition, by none other than Dr. Barry Sears, of The Zone diet fame. Sears manages to reduce Sinclair's message to an ode to safe protein that is oddly reminiscent of Gen. Ripper's obsession with "precious bodily fluids" in Dr. Strangelove. Turning to Schlosser's introduction, students can see how he shifts the focus from the dangers meat poses to its consumers to the dangers it poses to its producers. With this momentum, it is easier to help students see that the novel itself is far more concerned with industry than with meat, and with the welfare of working men and women, rather than consumers. This new edition both illustrates and explains Sinclair's complaint that he had "aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach."

Jonathan Beecher Field
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Clemson University

Course: "Engl 206: Survey of American Literature, 1850-1950"