Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory


Peter Barry - 1995
    This new and expanded third edition continues to offer students and readers the best one-volume introduction to the field.The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unraveled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Peter Barry allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped.

Literary Theory: An Anthology


Julie Rivkin - 1997
    This anthology of classic and cutting-edge statements in literary theory has now been updated to include recent influential texts in the areas of Ethnic Studies, Postcolonialism and International StudiesA definitive collection of classic statements in criticism and new theoretical work from the past few decades All the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory are represented, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Enables students to familiarise themselves with the most recent developments in literary theory and with the traditions from which these new theories derive

In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation


Mona Baker - 1992
    The strategies are identified by an examination of authentic examples of translated texts in a variety of languages. No knowledge of linguistics or foreign languages is assumed. Each chapter begins with an explanation of the key linguistic concepts referred to and ends with a series of practical exercises. By striking a balance between theory and practice, the book provides a sound basis for training professional translators.

A History of the English Language


Albert C. Baugh - 1951
    The emphasis is on political, social and cultural forces that affect language. The fifth edition reflects the latest trends and statistics of the past 10 years in a revised and updated Chapter One, "English Present and Future." It also provides a new section on gender issues and linguistic change and includes a thorough revision of Chapter 11, "The English Language in America," including updated material on African American Vernacular English. Discusses Black English and varieties of English in both Africa and Asia, as well as varieties in the United States, Australia and Canada. Includes a map of American dialects. Provides examples of twentieth-century vocabulary. For multilingual readers or anyone who wishes to develop a well-rounded understanding of present-day English.

Self-Reliance


Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1841
    Excerpted from Essays, First Series.

A History of English Literature (Palgrave Foundations)


Michael Alexander - 2000
    Offering a comprehensive account of one of the world's richest literatures, A History of English Literature traces its developments from the Old English period until the present day. A narrative which is also a discussion of major authors, the history reads as a clear and coherent whole.

The Classic Fairy Tales


Maria Tatar - 1998
    The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel," and presents multicultural variants and sophisticated literary rescriptings. Also reprinted are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde."Criticism" gathers twelve essays that interpret aspects of fairy tales, including their social origins, historical evolution, psychological drama, gender issues, and national identities.A Selected Bibliography is included.

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms


Mark Strand - 2000
    But distinguished poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland have produced a clear, super-helpful book that unravels part of the mystery of great poems through an engaging exploration of poetic structure. Strand and Boland begin by promising to "look squarely at some of the headaches" of poetic form: the building blocks of poetry. The Making of a Poem gradually cures many of those headaches.Strand, who's won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship and has served as U.S. Poet Laureate, and Boland, an abundantly talented Irish poet who has also written a beautiful book of essays on writing and womanhood, are both accustomed to teaching. Strand, now at the University of Chicago, and Boland, a Stanford professor, draw upon decades in the classroom to anticipate most questions.Ever wonder what a pantoum is? A villanelle? A sestina? With humor, patience, and personal anecdotes, Strand and Boland offer answers. But the way they answer is what makes this book stand out. The forms are divided into three overarching categories: metrical forms, shaping forms, and open forms. "Metrical forms" include the sonnet, pantoum, and heroic couplet. "Shaping forms" explains broader categories, like the elegy, ode, and pastoral poem. And "open forms" offers new takes on the traditional blueprints, exploring poems like Allen Ginsberg's "America."Each established form is then approached in three ways, followed by several pages of outstanding poems in that form. First, the editors offer a "page at a glance" guide, with five or six characteristics of that specific form presented in a brief outline. For example, the pantoum is defined like this:   1) Each pantoum stanza must be four lines long.   2) The length is unspecified but the pantoum must begin and end with the same line.   3) The second and fourth lines of the first quatrain become the first and third line of the next, and so on with succeeding quatrains.   4) The rhyming of each quatrain is abab.   5) The final quatrain changes this pattern.   6) In the final quatrain the unrepeated first and third lines are used in reverse as second and fourth lines.With this outline, it's easy to identify the looping pantoum. In the second piece of the pantoum section, Strand and Boland include a "History of the Form" section, again condensed to one page. Here, we learn that the pantoum is "Malayan in origin and came into English, as so many other strict forms have, through France." Indeed, both Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire tried their hands at the pantoum. As always, Strand and Boland offer some comparison to the other forms, which helps explain why a poet might choose to write a pantoum over, say, a sonnet or a sestina:"Of all verse forms the pantoum is the slowest. The reader takes four steps forward, then two steps back. It is the perfect form for the evocation of a past time." Next, the editors include "The Contemporary Context," which introduces several of the pantoums of this century. Finally, in what may be the book's best feature, they provide a close-up of a pantoum, an approach they repeat for each form discussed. In this case, it's the "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice. The editors offer some biographical information on Justice, and then they map out how that specific poem gets its power. This "poet's explanation" of the workings of a poem is invaluable, especially when it comes from leading poets such as Stand and Boland. What's more, these remarks are transferable. Reading how Strand and Boland view a dozen poems transforms the way one reads. With any future poem, you can look for what Strand and Boland have found in the greats.The editors offer their readers a great start, with a list for further reading and a helpful glossary. If anything can get a person excited about poetry, this selection of poems can -- though the editors, as working poets, readily admit their choices are idiosyncratic. Gems here include the best work of lesser-known poets, including several "poets' poets." For example, Edward Thomas, a prominent reviewer in his day and a close friend of Robert Frost's, is represented by "Rain," an absolutely brilliant blank-verse poem which begins:      Rain, midnight rain, nothing but wild rain      On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me      Remembering again that I shall die      And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks      For washing me cleaner than I have been       Since I was born into this solitude. Thomas's poem -- and other treasures here -- introduces readers to what and how poets read to learn to make poems. Of course, many of the usual suspects are found here, but the surprises are exciting, and even the old favorites seem new when the editors explain why and how a particular poem seems beautiful. This is particularly evident in their discussion of Edna St. Vincent Millay's rushing, initially breathless sonnet "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and How, " which reads:      What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,      I have forgotten, and what arms have lain      Under my head till morning, but the rain      Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh      Upon the glass and listen for reply,       And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain      For unremembered lads that not again      Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.       Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree      Nor knows what birds have vanquished one by one,      Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:       I cannot say what loves have come and gone,       I only know that summer sang in me      A little while, that in me sings no more. In the "close-up" section, Strand and Boland offer an biographical paragraph that mentions that in 1923, Millay became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They then discuss Millay's "distinctive and unusual" approach to the sonnet form: "Instead of taking the more leisurely pace of the public sonnet that had been the 19th-century model, she drove her sonnets forward with a powerful lyric music and personal emphasis."The editors point out Millay's heavy reliance on assonance and alliteration, and then note how she takes advantage of the different tempos the sonnet offers:"Here she uses her distinctive music and high diction to produce an unusually quick-paced poem in the first octave and then a slower, more reflective septet where the abandoned lover becomes a winter tree. This ability of the sonnet, to accommodate both lyric and reflective time, made it a perfect vehicle for highly intuitive twentieth-century poets like Millay."That simple explanation of the sonnet as a form able to "accommodate both lyric and reflective time" helps clarify most sonnets. But Strand and Boland are careful not to explain everything. The deepest beauty, as they explain in their introductory essays on their attraction to form, is built on mystery. And it is that attempt to understand the greatest mysteries that defines the greatest poems. Similarly, mystery often drives poets to write, as Strand explains in his essay on Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell," which Strand describes as the first poem he wished he had written himself in his early years as a poet:"Although I no longer wish I had written 'You, Andrew Marvell,' I wish, however, that I could write something like it, something with its sweep, its sensuousness, its sad crepuscular beauty, something capable of carving out such a large psychic space for itself&. There is something about it that moves me in ways I don't quite understand, as it were communicating more than what it actually says. This is often the case with good poems -- they have a lyric identity that goes beyond whatever their subject happens to be."With this book, Strand and Boland help quantify the explicable parts of a "lyric identity." Understanding form, the editors believe, is one way to begin understanding a poem's beauty. This lucid, useful book is a wonderful guide to that mysterious music.—Aviya Kushner

The Norton Shakespeare


William Shakespeare - 1972
    Combining the freshly edited texts of the Oxford Edition with lively introductions, this contemporary Shakespeare enables readers to see and read Shakespeare afresh.

Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain


Charles Dickens - 1848
    

Studying the Novel


Jeremy Hawthorn - 1992
    Updated throughout to reflect the profound impact of e-reading and digital resources on the contemporary study of literature, the book also now includes a wider range of international examples to reflect the growing field of world literature.Providing a complete guide to studying the novel in one easy-to-read volume, the book covers:· The form of the novel· The history of the novel, from its earliest days to new electronic forms· Realism, modernism and postmodernism· Analysing fiction: narrative, character, structure, theme and dialogue· Critical approaches to studying the novel· Practical guidance on critical reading, secondary criticism, electronic resources and essay writing· Versions and adaptationsStudying the Novel also includes a number of features to help readers navigate the book and find key information quickly, including chapter summaries throughout, a comprehensive glossary of terms and an historical timeline on the development of the novel, while annotated guides to further reading and discussion questions help students master the topics covered.

Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM


Duncan Wu - 1994
    This magnificent Anthology is now available as a package with David Miall and Duncan Wu's revolutionary Romanticism: The CD-ROM. Both works reflect recent developments in Romantic scholarship, particularly in the expansion of the literary canon. Alongside unabridged texts from canonical writers are works by women and writers in other genres, including political and philosophical writers, diarists, painters, broadside-balladeers, reviewers and letter-writers. Additions for the second edition of the Anthology include Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage, The Pedlar, Michael, The Brothers, and extracts from The Five-Book Prelude, and the Fourteen-Book Prelude; Coleridge's This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Kubla Khan, The Pains of Sleep, Dejection: An Ode, The Eolian Harp, and Frost at Midnight; Byron's Stanzas to Augusta, Epistle to Augusta and Don Juan Canto II.Substantial editorial material includes an introduction exploring the phenomenon of romanticism; detailed annotations and author headnotes providing biographical details; lists of significant recent criticism and in many cases brief critical introductions. The unique, easy to use CD-ROM both incorporates the anthology (in its first edition, including Wordsworth's Prelude (1805) in its entirety) and provides substantial selections from over ninety other writers. Built-in hypertext links enable readers to experience the intertextuality of writing during this period and understand the cultural context in which the texts werecreated. The CD-ROM offers a huge range of resources including: More than 1200 high-quality graphics, including illustrations, prints and paintings; scenes from the English Lake District, the Alps, and the ruins of Rome and Pompeii; photographs of landscapes and detailed maps. Chronologies. A biographic dictionary of the key figures of the period. A 'tours' feature, which enables teachers or students to build their own routes through the CD-ROM or to take preset introductory tours e.g. through 'slavery'. Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM is the most exciting resource available for students and researchers discovering the Romantic Period.

The Wasteland, Prufrock and Other Poems


T.S. Eliot - 1922
    S. Eliot's powerful collections into one. It includes such classic poems as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," "Gerontion," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and "The Waste Land."

Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice


Colin Renfrew - 1991
    Field methods and scientific techniques have been updated throughout, and new emphasis is placed on climate change and its impact on human affairs. The latest information on topics as varied as the Iceman, Pleistocene extinctions, and Ilama domestication is included, along with the most up-to-date material on GIS and surveying technology. New topics will be introduced to emphasize the ever-changing face of modern archaeology, and additional special box features will be included, as well as discussion of the archaeological techniques needed to study the material culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A key component of the new edition will be the introduction of a dedicated Web site and study guide to accompany the textbook itself.

The Study of Language


George Yule - 1985
    It introduces the analysis of the key elements of language--sounds, words, structures and meanings, and provides a solid foundation in all of the essential topics. The third edition has been extensively revised to include new sections on important contemporary issues in language study, including language and culture, African American English, sign language, and slang. A comprehensive glossary provides useful explanations of technical terms, and each chapter contains a range of new study questions and research tasks, with suggested answers.