Great Courses

When you hear the words “healthy food,” it’s all too easy to think of bland, uninspired, or unfamiliar food that takes all the pleasure out of cooking and eating. What often prevents us from practicing healthy eating habits: the wealth of misinformation out there about what foods are healthy and the idea that we have to sacrifice the flavor that makes food such an enjoyable part of life.

Great literature can be the means of understanding as well as creating our world—by teaching and reinforcing society's laws, articulating its values, and enforcing the social contracts that unite us as a culture. What if literature itself generated our ideas and feelings about justice, marriage and family, property, authority, race, or gender? What if it enflamed our determination to pursue justice—or, conversely, undermined our ability to detect injustice?