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Reading James Joyce: An Introduction (Reading Literature Today)
by Michael Patrick Gillespie A. Nicholas FargnoliReading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce’s writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce’s works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce’s innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, surveys of significant critical approaches to Joyce’s writings, and examples of alternative readings and contemporary responses. Each chapter will provide interpretive approaches to contemporary literary theories and key issues, including end-of-chapter strategies and extended readings for further engagement. This book also includes shorter assessments of Joyce’s lesser-known works—critical writings, drama, poetry, letters, epiphanies, and personal recollections—to contextualize the creative and social environments from which his most notable publications arose. This uniquely comprehensive guide to Joyce will be an invaluable and comprehensive resource for readers exploring the influential world of Joyce studies.
Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith: Influences And Borrowings
by Jacqueline M. LabbeThis book explores what it means to read the six major works of Jane Austen, inlight of the ten major works of fiction by Charlotte Smith. It proposes that Smithhad a deep and lasting impact on Austen, but this is not an influence study. Instead,it argues for the possibility that two authors who never met could between themwrite something into being, both responding to and creating a novelistic zeitgeist.This, the book argues, can be called co-writing. This book will appeal to studentsand scholars of the novel, of women’s writing, and of Smith and Austen specifically.
Reading John Keats
by Susan J. WolfsonJohn Keats (1795–1821), one of the best-loved poets of the Romantic period, is ever alive to words, discovering his purposes as he reads - not only books but also the world around him. Leading Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson explores the breadth of his works, including his longest ever poem Endymion; subsequent romances, Isabella (a Boccaccio tale with a proto-Marxian edge admired by George Bernard Shaw), the passionate Eve of St Agnes and knotty Lamia; intricate sonnets and innovative odes; the unfinished Hyperion project (Keats's existential rethinking of epic agony); and late lyrics involved with Fanny Brawne, the bright (sometimes dark) star of his last years. Illustrated with manuscript pages, title-pages, and two portraits, Reading John Keats investigates the brilliant complexities of Keats's imagination and his genius in wordplay, uncovering surprises and new delights, and encouraging renewed respect for the power of Keats's thinking and the subtle turns of his writing.
Reading John Milton: An Introduction (Reading Literature Today)
by David CurrellReading John Milton is a guide to Milton’s writings written for students, teachers, and readers everywhere seeking to approach this major figure in English and world literature. Milton’s works range from the monumental epic Paradise Lost to moving personal sonnets, from the tragic grandeur of Samson Agonistes to prose defenses of political liberty and religious tolerance. This book offers clear, fresh introductions and commentary that make an author with a reputation for difficulty relevant and accessible.Individual texts are placed in their literary and historical contexts, and explored so as to encourage fresh, independent interpretations informed by the contemporary humanities. Carefully organized for ease of use, the book opens with reasons why Milton matters, ideas for critical approaches, and a biography of Milton. Subsequent chapters are dedicated to groups of works or individual masterpieces. Key themes are placed in focus and a full overview provided for all of Milton’s major poems. Each chapter includes a set of stimulating questions and activities and suggestions for further reading keyed to a generous bibliography, including online resources.Reading John Milton is both an ideal introduction and a complete companion for anyone ready to experience the sublimity and delight of reading Milton.
Reading John Milton: How to Persist in Troubled Times
by Stephen DobranskiA captivating biography that celebrates the audacious, inspiring life and works of John Milton, revealing how he speaks to our times. John Milton is unrivalled—for the music of his verse and the breadth of his learning. In this brisk, topical, and engaging biography, Stephen B. Dobranski brushes the scholarly dust from the portrait of the artist to reveal Milton's essential humanity and his unwavering commitment to ideals—freedom of religion and the right and responsibility of all persons to think for themselves—that are still relevant and necessary in our times. Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, is considered by many to be English poetry's masterpiece. Samuel Johnson, not one for effusive praise, claimed that from Milton's "books alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned." But Milton's renown rests on more than his artistic achievements. In a time of convulsive political turmoil, he justified the killing of a king, pioneered free speech, and publicly defended divorce. He was, in short, an iconoclast, an independent, even revolutionary, thinker. He was also an imperfect man—acrimonious, sometimes mean. Above all, he understood adversity. Afflicted by blindness, illness, and political imprisonment, Milton always sought to "bear up and steer right onward" through life's hardships. Dobranski looks beyond Milton's academic standing, beyond his reputation as a dour and devout purist, to reveal the ongoing power of his works and the dauntless courage that he both wrote about and exemplified.
Reading Joyce (Reading Literature)
by David Pierce`Is there one who understands me?' So wrote James Joyce towards the end of his final work, Finnegans Wake. The question continues to be asked about the author who claimed that he had put so many enigmas into Ulysses that it would `keep the professors busy for centuries' arguing over what he meant. For Joyce this was a way of ensuring his immortality, but it could also be claimed that the professors have served to distance Joyce from his audience, turning his writings into museum pieces, pored over and admired, but rarely touched. In this remarkable book, steeped in the learning gained from a lifetime's reading, David Pierce blends word, life and image to bring the works of one of the great modern writers within the reach of every reader. With a sharp eye for detail and an evident delight in the cadences of Joyce's work, Pierce proves a perfect companion, always careful and courteous, pausing to point out what might otherwise be missed. Like the best of critics, his suggestive readings constantly encourage the reader back to Joyce's own words. Beginning with Dubliners and closing with Finnegans Wake, Reading Joyce is full of insights that are original and illuminating, and Pierce succeeds in presenting Joyce as an author both more straightforward and infinitely more complex than we had perhaps imagined. T. S. Eliot wrote of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, that it is `a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape'. With David Pierce as a guide, the debt we owe to Joyce becomes clearer, and the need to flee is greatly reduced.
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: The Alternative Dystopian Imagination (Routledge Focus on Literature)
by Eva Pelayo SañudoReading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: The Alternative Dystopian Imagination aims to offer innovative perspectives for the analysis of Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s oeuvre through a focus on the genre of science fiction, particularly the novel Never Let Me Go (2005). The study proposes the term "intimate dystopia" to reflect on the passage from totalitarian or external oppressive forces to more "subtle" systems of power. Its interdisciplinary approach combines, apart from literary theory on different genres such as science fiction and memory, race studies, feminism and ecocriticism. It is based on an exhaustive critical and textual analysis that allows for a thorough and nuanced understanding of Ishiguro’s multi-layered novel, covering themes such as the ethical dimensions and gender implications of caregiving, the dystopian portrayal of the environment, the significance of art in the existence of marginalized groups and the genre-related complexities of the text.
Reading Keats’s Poetry: Alternative Subject Positions and Subject-Object Relations (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
by Merve GündayThis book claims that Keats’s poetry is a reaction against the discourse of modernity which traumatized the human subject by creating a divide between human and nature, subject and object. It argues that by transcending this divide and acknowledging the agency of both subject and object, Keats makes an ideological statement and offers a new site of existence or relationality to readers. This site also implies a response to the accusations that the Romantics were not interested in the realities of their time. What Keats does is to give an aestheticized response to the hardcore facts of his time. Departing from previous studies due to its emphasis on subjectivity and relationality, the book discusses Keats with regard to post/non-anthropocentric, alternative subject positions and subject-object relations in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” “In drear nighted December,” “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,” “Lamia,” “La Belle Dame sans Mercy,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Drawing on Lacanian and Braidottian epistemologies in its discussion of the intricacy between the imaginary and the symbolic, the irruption of the psychotic into the symbolic, and the agency of the object on the subject in Keats’s poetry, the book suggests that the inner dynamics of both the subject and the object acquire agency, which shatters Oneness and totality assumed in the Cartesian self.
Reading Keys (Fourth Edition)
by Laraine E. FlemmingREADING KEYS - the first in a three-book reading series by Laraine Flemming - offers a comprehensive introduction to reading skills and strategies, from using context clues to identifying purpose and bias. Clear, accessible explanations present reading concepts without oversimplifying the process of reading comprehension. To ensure students' understanding, reading "keys" or summaries follow the explanations, breaking them down into manageable chunks. Throughout each chapter, a variety of steadily more difficult exercises assess students' understanding of the material and promote improved comprehension and critical-thinking skills. This incremental approach to instruction and assessment makes it easier for beginning readers to absorb and master new information. The Fourth Edition includes new chapters on analyzing arguments and sentence relationships. In addition, there is a greater emphasis on recognizing and understanding verbal clues to meaning, new discussions on how the brain learns and remembers new information, and several new engaging readings.
Reading Lacan’s Seminar VIII: Transference (The Palgrave Lacan Series)
by Gautam Basu Thakur Jonathan DicksteinThis book provides 18 lively commentaries on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (1960-61) that explore its theoretical and philosophical consequences in the clinic, the classroom, and society. Including contributions from clinicians as well as scholars working in philosophy, literature, and culture studies, the commentaries presented here represent a wide-range of disciplinary perspectives on the concept of transference. Some chapters closely follow the structure of the seminar’s sessions, while others take up thematic concerns or related sessions such as the commentary on sessions 19 to 22 which deal with Lacan’s discussion of Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy. This book is not a compendium to Lacan’s seminar. Instead it attempts to capture through shorter contributions a spectrum of voices debating, deliberating, and learning with Lacan’s concept. In doing so it can be seen to engage with transference conceptually in a manner that matches the spirit of Lacan’s seminar itself.The book will provide an invaluable new resource for Lacan scholars working across the fields of psychoanalytic theory, clinical psychology, philosophy and cultural studies.
Reading The Legal Case: Cross-Currents between Law and the Humanities
by Marco WanThis volume examines the nature, function, development and epistemological assumptions of the legal case in an interdisciplinary context. Using the question of ‘reading’ as a guiding principle, it opens up new ways of understanding case law and the doctrine of precedent by bringing the law into dialogue with the humanities. What happens when a legal case is read not only by lawyers, but by literary critics, by linguists, by philosophers, or by historians? How do film makers and writers adapt and transform legal cases in their work? How might one interpret fiction in the context of the historical development of the common law? The essays in this volume test the boundaries of the legal case as a genre by inviting perspectives from other disciplines, and in doing so also raise more fundamental questions of what constitutes law and legal thinking. This book will be of interest to anyone seeking a better understanding of the common law, the humanities, and the intersection between them.
Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel
by Michael A. ChaneyLiterary scholar Michael A. Chaney examines graphic novels to illustrate that in form and function they inform readers on how they ought to be read. His arguments result in an innovative analysis of the various knowledges that comics produce and the methods artists and writers employ to convey them. Theoretically eclectic, this study attends to the lessons taught by both the form and content of today's most celebrated graphic novels.Chaney analyzes the embedded lessons in comics and graphic novels through the form's central tropes: the iconic child storyteller and the inherent childishness of comics in American culture; the use of mirrors and masks as ciphers of the unconscious; embedded puzzles and games in otherwise story-driven comic narratives; and the form's self-reflexive propensity for showing its work. Comics reveal the labor that goes into producing them, embedding lessons on how to read the "work" as a whole.Throughout, Chaney draws from a range of theoretical insights from psychoanalysis and semiotics to theories of reception and production from film studies, art history, and media studies. Some of the major texts examined include Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis; Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth; Joe Sacco's Palestine; David B.'s Epileptic; Kyle Baker's Nat Turner; and many more. As Chaney's examples show, graphic novels teach us even as they create meaning in their infinite relay between words and pictures.
Reading LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books (Children's Literature Association Series)
by Jennifer Miller and Sara AustinContributions by Sara Austin, Rob Bittner, J. Bradley Blankenship, Gabriel Duckels, Caitlin Howlett, Isabel Millán, Jennifer Miller, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Tim Morris, Dana Rudolph, j wallace skelton, Jason Vanfosson, River Vooris, and B. J. WoodsteinPicture books are books aimed at children where the illustrations are as important, or more important, than the text. Picture books, the effects of their simple text and importance in the literary canon, have been studied by scholars for decades, but little attention has been given to LGBTQ+ picture books. Reading LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books is a collection of essays that identifies and interprets children’s picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ content.Contributors to the volume include established and emerging scholars with expertise in the fields of children’s literature, young adult literature, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and education. Each essay introduces readers to several children’s books that denote unmistakable LGBTQ+ content. Essays bring various interpretive frameworks and intellectual commitments to their unique readings of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. The essays in Reading LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books produce innovative new scholarship about a range of topics including representations of LGBTQ+ marriage and parenting and LGBTQ+ history and culture. The topics explored, and theoretical frameworks applied, significantly expand available and accessible up-to-date scholarship on the growing field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books.
Reading Life: Books for the Ages
by Sven BirkertsA new, compelling collection of essays by Sven Birkerts, "one of America's most distinguished, eloquent servants of the poetry and fiction that matter" (Susan Sontag). Reading, the mind's traffic in signs and signifiers, is the most dynamic, changeful, and possibly transformational act we can imagine. To have read a work and have been strongly affected by it--and then to come back to it after many years--can be a foundation-shaking enterprise. In Reading Life, virtuoso critic and essayist Sven Birkerts examines what it means to return to resonant works of fiction--the books one thinks of "covetously, as private properties," the "personal signposts" of one's inner life. For Birkerts, these include The Catcher in the Rye, Humboldt's Gift, To the Lighthouse, and Lolita. In twelve far-reaching and intimate essays, Birkerts reflects upon his first readings and what later encounters reveal about time, memory, and the murmuring transistors of selfhood.
The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes
by C. S. LewisThe revered teacher and bestselling author of such classic Christian works as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters reflects on the power, importance, and joy of a life dedicated to reading books in this delightful collection drawn from his wide body of writings.More than fifty years after his death, revered intellectual and teacher C. S. Lewis continues to speak to readers, thanks not only to his intellectual insights on Christianity but also his wondrous creative works and deep reflections on the literature that influenced his life. Beloved for his instructive novels including The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Chronicles of Narnia as well as his philosophical books that explored theology and Christian life, Lewis was a life-long writer and book lover.Cultivated from his many essays, articles, and letters, as well as his classic works, How to Read provides guidance and reflections on the love and enjoyment of books. Engaging and enlightening, this well-rounded collection includes Lewis’ reflections on science fiction, why children’s literature is for readers of all ages, and why we should read two old books for every new one.A window into the thoughts of one of the greatest public intellectuals of our time, this collection reveals not only why Lewis loved the written word, but what it means to learn through literature from one of our wisest and most enduring teachers.
Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature (Children's Literature Association Series)
by Sara K. DayBy examining the novels of critically and commercially successful authors such as Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You), Stephenie Meyer (the Twilight series), and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature explores the use of narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger, often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy. Reading Like a Girl explains the construction of narrator-reader relationships in recent American novels written about adolescent women and marketed to adolescent women. Sara K. Day explains, though, that such levels of imagined friendship lead to contradictory cultural expectations for the young women so deeply obsessed with reading these novels. Day coins the term “narrative intimacy” to refer to the implicit relationship between narrator and reader that depends on an imaginary disclosure and trust between the story's narrator and the reader. Through critical examination, the inherent contradictions between this enclosed, imagined relationship and the real expectations for adolescent women's relations prove to be problematic. In many novels for young women, adolescent female narrators construct conceptions of the adolescent woman reader, constructions that allow the narrator to understand the reader as a confidant, a safe and appropriate location for disclosure. At the same time, such novels offer frequent warnings against the sort of unfettered confession the narrators perform. Friendships are marked as potential sites of betrayal and rejection. Romantic relationships are presented as inherently threatening to physical and emotional health. And so, the narrator turns to the reader for an ally who cannot judge. The reader, in turn, may come to depend upon narrative intimacy in order to vicariously explore her own understanding of human expression and bonds.
Reading Like a Lawyer: Time-Saving Strategies for Reading Law Like an Expert
by Ruth Ann McKinneyThe ability to read law well is an indispensable skill that can make or break the academic career of any aspiring lawyer. Fortunately, the ability to read law well (quickly and accurately) is a skill that can be acquired through knowledge and practice. First published in 2005, Reading Like a Lawyer has become a staple on many law school reading lists for prospective and admitted students. The second edition includes the same critical reasoning and reading strategies, accompanied by hands-on practice exercises, that made the first edition such a success. It adds a valuable new chapter on a growing challenge for this generation of legal readers: how to read material that is presented on a screen with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
by Francine ProseA distinguished novelist and critic inspires readers and writers with this inside look at how the professionals read—and write Long before there were creative writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. As she takes us on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—Prose discovers why these writers endure. She takes pleasure in the signature elements of such outsatanding writers as Philip Roth, Isaac Babel, John Le Carré, James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield. Throughout, she cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
Reading Like A Historian: Teaching Literacy In Middle And High School History Classrooms
by Sam Wineburg Daisy Martin Chauncey Monte-SanoFeaturing an expanded introduction, this award-winning bestseller has been updated to link curriculum to the Common Core State Standards. This popular text shows how to apply Wineburg’s highly acclaimed approach to teaching― Reading Like a Historian―to middle and high school classrooms, increasing academic literacy and sparking students’ curiosity. Each chapter begins with an introductory essay that sets the stage of a key moment in American history―beginning with exploration and colonization and the events at Jamestown and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Primary documents, charts, graphic organizers, visual images, and political cartoons follow each essay, as well as suggestions for where to find additional resources on the Internet and guidance for assessing students’ understanding of core historical ideas. Reading Like a Historian helps teachers use textbooks creatively and provides a wealth of ideas for how historical instruction can enhance students’ skills in reading comprehension.
Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture)
by Karen Edwards Derek Ryan Jane SpencerReading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.
Reading Literature: Fiction, Poetry, and Exercises Based on Common Core State Standards
by Prestwick HouseA language arts textbook for level 9
Reading Literature in Portuguese
by Claudia Pazos Alonso"This collection brings together textual commentaries on thirty representative works of literature in Portuguese - either complete poems or extracts from longer works - ranging from the medieval lyric of the 13th century, through the poetry and drama of the Portuguese Renaissance, the great Realist novels of the nineteenth century, early twentieth century Modernism and post-1974 writings through to the present day, while also including examples of 19th- and 20th- century Brazilian literature. The authors chosen - poets, dramatists and novelists - are generally regarded as iconic writers, and the three most famous canonical Portuguese authors (Luis de Camoes, Fernando Pessoa, Jose Saramago) are featured, but the texts selected for commentary strike a balance between a focus on well-known and lesser-studied works. All the primary texts are reproduced in Portuguese, sometimes in original editions, with English translations added for the majority. The contributors variously explicate and contextualise the works they present, some focusing on hidden meaning, others on philological aspects of editing, others on their historical, intellectual and philosophical context, and others still on the process of translation itself. All, however, aim to develop the art of reading, for the benefit of scholars and students alike. Stephen Parkinson and Claudia Pazos Alonso are members of the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at Oxford University, and editors of the Companion to Portuguese Literature (Tamesis, 2009)."
The Reading Lives of Teens: Research and Practice
by Chin Ee LohIn these changing times of global flows of media and technologies and reports of declining reading enjoyment, researchers, policymakers and educators need to engage anew with essential issues of what counts as reading, what kinds of reading matter and how to support teen reading engagement in school and out-of-school settings.Bringing together contributions from well-known and emerging adolescent literacy researchers from different disciplinary perspectives, this edited collection consolidates contemporary research on teens’ volitional print and digital reading, whether in school or out-of-school contexts. The first part of the book offers overviews of what teens are reading, followed by chapters on community support on reading and new ways of researching teen reading. With chapters from North America, Europe, Australia, Asia and the Middle East, the collection will offer multifaceted and complex insights into what, how and why teens read in different contexts. Reflection questions at the end of each chapter encourage readers to consider how the research can be applied in their own research, policy and practice contexts.This book will be of interest to researchers, policymakers and educators who are invested in supporting adolescent-engaged reading with evidence-based policies and strategies.
Reading London in Wartime: Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by William CederwellReading London in Wartime: Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature presents an expansive variety of writers and genres, including non-fiction and film approaches, to build a comprehensive social picture of the atmosphere during wartime London. From blitz and austerity to the nagging insistency of propaganda, this volume examines the representation of London in wartime and early post-war literature through each writer’s unique perspective on the pressures of 1940s city life. Exploring the use of London imagery, this book considers how literature redirects attention to individual, subjective experience at a time of enforced co-operation, uniformity and community. Unlike government information films and news broadcasts, which often used London to prop up prevailing clichés and stereotypes, and encouraged patriotic support for the war, literature had the freedom to express more recalcitrant truths. London writing of the 1940s was not a literature of opposition or dissent, but in offering more nuanced depictions of the period, it was a counterweight to propaganda and the general war temperament. In writing, the city becomes a more complex place, no longer the easy symbol of defiance and stoicism, of the shared sacrifice of ration book and war work.
Reading London’s Suburbs
by Ged PopeA study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.