By Patrick Smith, Bainbridge State College, Georgia Writers have drawn on vivid descriptions of the visual arts to enhance their work since Homer famously used 130 lines to describe the chronicle emblazoned on Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of Homer’s Iliad more than 2,500 years ago. Ekphrasis—the representation in language […]
Tag: Writing
Writers and Copywriters: Literature and Advertising
Before he wrote Midnight’s Children – the 1981 novel which would win not only the Booker Prize for that year but the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award in 1993 – Salman Rushdie worked in advertising. It was during this period in the 1970s that Rushdie came up with several classic advertising slogans: […]
Guest Blog: Why Read Dickens?
By Alexander Atkins, and posted last year on his excellent blog for the Dickens bicentenary. The image below was designed by him to mark the occasion This  200th article on Bookshelf is dedicated to my teacher, mentor, and dear friend, Tom A., who taught me how to understand the human condition […]
Surprising Facts about Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was once described as the last person to have read everything, so steeped in literature, philosophy, and learning was he. Certainly, he gave us a very useful phrase concerning good fiction: the expression ‘suspension of disbelief’ is a coinage of his, and describes the unofficial contract we all enter into […]