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Literature: A Student's Guide Paperback – June 30, 2012

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 144 pages
  • Publisher: Crossway (June 30, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1433531437
  • ISBN-13: 978-1433531439
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 7.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #679,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 starsNeed a literature intervention? Read this book.
By Cary D. Plunkett on July 8, 2012
Format: Kindle Edition
Unless you were an English major in college you probably took a lit class and wondered what the heck you were taking that class for. Way back around 1999 I was taking a World Lit class and I was wondering that. I was attending a college that had recently dropped the "Community College" at the end of their name and became an official university. My teacher was a man that was probably really interested in literature at first but then he turned into a cliche of himself. Coughing his way through each lecture only to join half the class in the smoking section later. I was 19 and seeing as I was an undeclared major I was really wondering what the heck I was doing in that class.

Fast forward a decade and I'm in love with reading and reading dorky books about literature. Let's face it, unless you are a student of literature you are probably not going to buy this book. But Louis Markos does a great job of wanting you to buy his book. In the introduction he says, "Aside from the Bible itself--which is, in any case, composed of over a dozen different literary genres, especially poetry--literature is one of our best tools and guides for achieving this grand and humanizing synthesis." I was almost turned off by this book when in the first chapter the author tricks you into thinking it's a book about literature when really he wants to teach you about poetry (which is something I am completely dense about). However, he redeems himself with chapter three.

Chapter three is the author's required reading, if you will. He breaks down every age, genre and author and tells you why they are important and why you, as a believer and student of God, should want to read these, otherwise, secular books.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent resource!
By Amazon Customer on July 31, 2014
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
If you're having trouble with the "Christian" stuff, I would like to remind you that Western thought without Christianity is like a human without a circulatory system. It's there and ignoring it just means that you only understand an infinitesimal fraction of the rich and deep thought enshrined in the West.

And you could set aside the author's faith to use this book as an excellent reference on the pre-Marxism canon and the mechanical study of poetry. In other words, as a student of literature, in my second year of my Master's, this short work taught me more about my major than all of the courses in literature I have ever taken.

There is an entire chapter on poetic feet-- how they are counted, what they are called, how they are measured... You will learn all the major forms of poetry along with their variations in feet and rhyme scheme. I had never been taught this stuff at any stage of my education!

An incredible chapter on the major Western literary periods forms, for me, the most valuable section of the book. Each literary period is prefaced with an easy-to-reference guide clearly stating the period's time frames, major authors, major works, and genres. It then goes into a startling amount of detail fr each considering the constraint of space. This canon exploration moves from ancient Greece to postmodernism and does so with amazing precision.
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5.0 out of 5 starsHow to Read a Poem, and Why
By George P. Wood VINE VOICE on July 24, 2015
Format: Paperback
The Greek poet Archilochus said, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” By that standard, I am a fox. For as long as I can remember, I have tried to gain a generalist’s understanding of the world rather than a specialist’s. And I have tried to do this from within a Christian worldview.

So, you can understand why Crossway’s Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series is appealing to me. It consists of brief introductions to various academic disciplines—e.g., liberal arts, natural sciences, social sciences—written by Christian professors for Christian college students, faculty, and trustees. Though I’m well past my college years and not an academic, I still like to learn, so I have been reading my way through the series.

Literature by Louis Markos is interesting, though misnamed. It focuses on poetry rather than other literary genres, such as novels, short stories, and essays. It is valuable precisely as a primer for how to read a poem and why.

Markos divides his discussion of poetry into four topics: rhythm and rhyme (Chapter 1); words and images (Chapter 2); ages, authors, and genres (Chapter 3); and theory and criticism (Chapter 4). Throughout, he displays an appreciation of traditional poetic forms and meters as well as the interpretive techniques of the New Critics.

In the Introduction, Markos makes a general case for the value of literature in a scientific age, one that I resonate with: “We cannot live in such a vast sea of discrete, unassimilated, often anti-humanistic facts [i.e., facts disclosed to us by science]. We must make sense of the facts, must synthesize them somehow with what our race has learned about God, man, and the universe…literature is one of our best tools and guides for achieving this grand and humanizing synthesis.”

Amen to that!
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5.0 out of 5 starsOnly a Beginning
By Ben House on August 27, 2012
Format: Paperback
This book is another installation in the Crossway Books series called "Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition." The books in this series are short and compact, but the content is heavy. They are designed for college level serious students. This is one of those books that tells you how much you don't know. Or at least that was how it impacted me. I have studied and taught literature for years, but this survey of literary history, study of poetic forms, and examination of literary criticism called me up short. It is a good syllabus for what a literature student needs to read or know. Anyone who wants to get into reading literature would be better served by reading the book LIT: A CHRISTIAN GUIDE TO READING BOOKS by Tony Reinke, another Crossway publication. And the person becoming a student of literature can delve into the wealth of materials by Leland Ryken. When the decision is made to major or minor in literature (or teach literature), then this book needs to be read quickly, then re-read slowly, and then used repeatedly for reminders and insights.

Louis Markos has written several fine studies of literature in recent years and has produced a wonderful series of audio lectures on the writings of C. S. Lewis. He is a professor of English at Houston Baptist College.
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