Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis


Michael Ward - 2008
    S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery.Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation." Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called 'the kappa element in romance', the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaitre knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody.Planet Narnia is a ground-breaking study that will provoke a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles, but of Lewis's whole literary and theological outlook. Ward uncovers a much subtler writer and thinker than has previously been recognized, whose central interests were hiddenness, immanence, and knowledge by acquaintance."

Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film TV


Barry Forshaw - 2013
    A compact and authoritative guide to the phenomenally popular genre, by a leading expert in Scandinavian crime fictionThis information-packed study examines and celebrates books, films, and TV adaptations, from Sjöwall and Wahlöö's highly influential Martin Beck series through Henning Mankell's Wallander (subject of three separate TV series) to Stieg Larsson's groundbreaking The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; cult TV hits such as the Danish The Killing, The Bridge, and the political thriller Borgen; up to the massively successful books and films of the current king of the field, Norway's Jo Nesbø. It anatomizes the nigh-obsessive appeal of the subject and highlights every key book, film, and TV show. Aimed at both the beginner and the aficionado, this is a hugely informative, highly accessible guide to an essential crime genre.

Assessing Learners with Special Needs: An Applied Approach


Terry Overton - 1991
    Each chapter starts out with a chapter focus that contains CEC Knowledge and Skills Standards that show you what you are expected to master in the chapter. Concepts are presented in a step-by-step manner followed by exercises that help you understand each step. Portions of assessment instruments, protocols, and scoring tables are provided to help you with the practice exercises. Additionally, you will participate in the educational decision-making process using data from classroom observations, curriculum-based assessment, functional behavior assessment, and norm-referenced assessment. New to the seventh edition: An emphasis on progress monitoring, including progress monitoring applied to the acquisition of knowledge and skills presented in this text The assessment process according to the regulations of IDEA 2004 A separate chapter on transition issues and assessment A separate chapter on assessment in infancy and early childhood A new chapter on the measurement aspects of Response to Intervention Increased consideration of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the assessment process

Poetics


Aristotle
    Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (‘imitation’), hamartia (‘error’), and katharsis (‘purification’). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.Malcolm Heath’s lucid English translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. It is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail and includes suggestions for further reading.

The Language of Inquiry


Lyn Hejinian - 2000
    Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

English Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-To-Use Techniques & Materials for Grades 7-12


Mary Lou Brandvik - 1994
    Included are 175 easy-to-use strategies, lessons, and checklists for effective classroom management, and over 50 reproducible samples that you can adopt immediately for planning, evaluation, or assignments. The Guide helps you create a classroom that reflects the excitement for learning that every English teacher desires.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman's Life


Linda Wagner-Martin - 2004
    Using cultural and gender studies as contexts, Wagner-Martin brings new information to the story of the Alabama judge's daughter who, at seventeen, met her husband-to-be, Scott Fitzgerald. Swept away from her stable home life into Jazz Age New York and Paris, Zelda eventually learned to be a writer and a painter; and she came close to being a ballerina. An evocative portrayal of a talented woman's professional and emotional conflicts, this study contains extensive notes and new photographs.

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction


Frank Kermode - 1967
    Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit. Kermode then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. He goes on to deal perceptively with modern literaturewith "traditionalists" such as Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the difference between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth, or commenting on the vogue of the Absurd, Kermode is distinctly lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.

The Uses of Literature


Italo Calvino - 1980
    His fascination with myth is evident in pieces on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the separate odysseys that make up Homer's Odyssey. Three intertwined essays on French utopian socialist Fourier present him as a precursor of Women's Lib, a satirist and visionary thinker whose scheme for a society in which each person's desires could be satisfied deserves to be taken seriously. In other pieces, Calvino brings a fresh, unpredictable approach to why we should reread the classics, how cinema and comic strips influence writers, and the cartoon universe of Saul Steinberg. His message is that writers need to establish erotic communion with the humdrum objects of everyday reality.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale


Marina Warner - 2014
    These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed down from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale. But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over her long writing career, and she explores here a multitude of tales through the ages, their different manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. From the phenomenal rise of Victorian and Edwardian literature to contemporary children's stories, Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White and gothic interpretations such as Pan's Labyrinth. In ten succinct chapters, Marina Warner digs into a rich collection of fairy tales in their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. She makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture.

Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview and Other Conversations


Gabriel García Márquez - 2015
    In addition to the first-ever English translation of García Márquez’s last interview, this unprecedented volume includes his first interview, conducted while he was in the throes of writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, which reveals the young writer years before the extraordinary onslaught of success that would make him a household name around the world. Also featured is a series of unusually wide-ranging conversations with García Márquez's friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza—surely the only interview with García Márquez that includes the writer's insights into both the meaning of true love and the validity of superstitions. Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview also contains two interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Streitfeld. A wide-ranging and revealing book, Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview is an essential book for lifelong fans of García Márquez—and readers who are just getting encountering the master's work for the first time.

Studies in Classic American Literature


D.H. Lawrence - 1923
    In these highly individual, penetrating essays he has exposed 'the American whole soul' within some of that continent's major works of literature. In seeking to establish the status of writings by such authors as Poe, Melville, Fenimore Cooper and Whitman, Lawrence himself has created a classic work. Studies in Classic American Literature is valuable not only for the light it sheds on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American consciousness, telling 'the truth of the day', but also as a prime example of Lawrence's learning, passion and integrity of judgement.

Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case


A.M. Rosenthal - 1964
    Rosenthal, who would later become one of the most controversial editors The New York Times has ever had, was the newspaper's city editor then; the murder happened on his beat. He first published this book in 1964, the year of the murder. It is part memoir, part investigative journalism, and part public service.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry


Margaret Ferguson - 1970
    The anthology offers more poetry by women (40 new poets), with special attention to early women poets. The book also includes a greater diversity of American poetry, with double the number of poems by African American, Hispanic, native American and Asian American poets. There are 26 new poets representing the Commonwealth literature tradition: now included are more than 37 poets from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Caribbean, South Africa and India.

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life: Bookmarked


Steve Almond - 2019
    It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America’s soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.