Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 10591133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, student teachers, education specialists, and teachers in all humanities disciplines will find these volumes particularly helpful.
Accurate and reliable biographical information essential to anyone interested in the world of literature TheInternational Who's Who of Authors and Writersoffers invaluable information on the personalities and organizations of the literary world, including many up-and-coming writers as well as established names. With over 8,000 entries, this updated edition features: * Concise biographical information on novelists, authors, playwrights, columnists, journalists, editors, and critics * Biographical details of established writers as well as those who have recently risen to prominence * Entries detailing career, works published, literary awards and prizes, membership, and contact addresses where available * An extensive listing of major international literary awards and prizes, and winners of those prizes * A directory of major literary organizations and literary agents * A listing of members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Known from her day to ours as 'the Author of Frankenstein', Mary Shelley indeed created one of the central myths of modernity. But she went on to survive all manner of upheaval - personal, political, and professional - and to produce an oeuvre of bracing intelligence and wide cultural sweep. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley helps readers to assess for themselves her remarkable body of work. In clear, accessible essays, a distinguished group of scholars place Shelley's works in several historical and aesthetic contexts: literary history, the legacies of her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and of course the life and afterlife, in cinema, robotics and hypertext, of Frankenstein. Other topics covered include Mary Shelley as a biographer and cultural critic, as the first editor of Percy Shelley's works, and as travel writer. This invaluable volume is complemented by a chronology, a guide to further reading and a select filmography.
Teaching the Gothic provides a clear and accessible account of how scholarship on the Gothic has influenced the way in which the Gothic is taught. The book examines a range of topics including Gothic criticism, Theory, Romantic Gothic, Victorian Gothic, Female Gothic, Gothic Sexualities, Gothic Film and Postgraduate developments.
On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures presents studies of Frankenstein by international scholars from converging disciplines such as humanities, musicology, film studies, television studies, English and digital humanities. These innovative contributions investigate the afterlives of a novel taught in a disparate array of courses - Frankenstein disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of media, ensuring its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. Transmedia Creatures highlights how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from “below”) that often appear synchronously and dismantle and renew established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it. The authors engage with concepts, value systems and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the family, horror, monstrosity, diversity, education, risk, technology, the body—from a variety of contemporary approaches and highly original perspectives, which yields new connections. Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions, misreadings, and overreadings that attend it, and that reveal the complex interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
From All Quiet on the Western Front and Gone with the Wind to No Country for Old Men and Slumdog Millionaire, many of the most memorable films have been adapted from other sources. And while courses on film studies are taught throughout the world, The Pedagogy of Adaptation makes a strong case for treating adaptation studies as a separate discipline. What makes this book unique is its claim that adaptation is above all a creative process and not simply a slavish imitation or reproduction of an 'original.' This collection of essays focuses on numerous contexts to emphasize why adaptations matter to students of literature. It is the first such volume devoted exclusively to teaching adaptations from a practical, teacher-centered angle. Many of the essays show how 'adaptation' as a discipline can be used to prompt reflection on cultural, historical, and political differences. Written by specialists in a variety of fields, ranging from film, radio, theater, and even language studies, the book adopts a pluralistic view of adaptation, showing how its processes vary across different contexts and in different disciplines. Defining new horizons for the teaching of adaptation studies, these essays draw on such disparate sources as Frankenstein, Moby Dick, and South Park. This volume not only provides a resource-book of lesson plans but offers valuable pointers as to why teaching literature and film can help develop students' skills and improve their literacy.
This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Milton's Paradise Lost addresses Milton in the light of the digital age, new critical approaches to his poem, and his continued presence in contemporary culture. It aims to help instructors enliven the teaching of Paradise Lost and address the challenges presented to students by the poem--the early modern syntax and vocabulary, the political and theological contexts, and the abounding classical references. The first part of the volume, "Materials," evaluates the many available editions of the poem, points to relevant reference works, recommends additional reading, and outlines useful audiovisual and online aids for teaching Milton's epic poem. The essays in the second part, "Approaches," are grouped by several themes: literary and historical contexts, characters, poetics, critical approaches, classrooms, and performance. The essays cover epic conventions and literary and biblical allusions, new approaches such as ecocriticism and masculinity studies, and reading Milton on the Web, among other topics.
Although Robert Louis Stevenson was a late Victorian, his work--especially Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--still circulates energetically and internationally among popular and academic audiences and among young and old. Admired by Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, Stevenson's fiction crosses the boundaries of genre and challenges narrow definitions of the modern and the postmodern. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides an introduction to the writer's life, a survey of the criticism of his work, and a variety of resources for the instructor. In part 2, "Approaches," thirty essays address such topics as Stevenson's dialogue with James about literature; his verse for children; his Scottish heritage; his wanderlust; his work as gothic fiction, as science fiction, as detective fiction; his critique of imperialism in the South Seas; his usefulness in the creative writing classroom; and how Stevenson encourages expansive thinking across texts, times, places, and lives.
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has quickly joined the ranks of celebrated literary graphic novels. Set in part at a family-run funeral home, the book explores Alison's complicated relationship with her father, a closeted gay man. Amid the tensions of her home life, Alison discovers her own lesbian sexuality and her talent for drawing. The coming-of-age story and graphic format appeal to students. However, the book's nonlinear structure; intertextuality with modernist novels, Greek myths, and other works; and frank representations of sexuality and death present challenges in the classroom. This volume offers strategies for teaching Fun Home in a variety of courses, including literature, women's and gender studies, art, and education. Part 1, "Materials," outlines the text's literary, historical, and theoretical allusions. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," emphasize the work's genres, including autobiography and graphic narrative, as well as its psychological dimensions, including trauma, disability, and queer identity. The essays give options for reading Fun Home along with Bechdel's letters and drafts; her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For; the Broadway musical adaptation of the book; and other stories of LGBTQ lives.
