Thinking Literature

Inspired by Mary Shelley’s conviction that reading is a socially significant communal activity, Thinking Literature. Essays on Reading Literary Classics Today is a collection of four essays whose authors discuss modern interactions with literary classics. Antigone by Sophocles, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are read anew via their modern retellings and applied to the challenges and dangers of the contemporary world. The titular phrase, thinking literature, is meant to indicate reading literature of the previous epochs in a way that allows one to contemplate human condition against the background of the past and in connection with the present. Thinking literature as practised by rewriters, adaptors and interpreters is then shared with readers, creating the sense of dialogue without which the communal aspect of reading would not be fulfilled. The book begins with a short preface explaining the collection’s origin. In the first chapter Marcelina Połczyńska discusses Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire, a contemporary retelling of Antigone by Sophocles, which transplants the ancient conflict over burial rights and the legitimacy of law to the community of British Muslims in contemporary London. The second essay, by Wiktoria Wawrzyńczyk, examines Ahmed Saadawis Frankenstein in Baghdad.