The Reverend Awdry created Thomas the Tank Engine for his son, Christopher Awdry, who continued his father's work by writing a further 14 books. Thomas fans will be delighted to see all of Christopher Awdry's stories beautifully reproduced and printed for the first time since 1996. Christopher Awdry's first Thomas book for 10 years is also being published by Egmont in September 2007.
The Reverend Awdry created Thomas the Tank Engine for his son, Christopher Awdry, who continued his father's work by writing a further 14 books. Thomas fans will be delighted to see all of Christopher Awdry's stories beautifully reproduced and printed for the first time since 1996. Christopher Awdry's first Thomas book for 10 years is also being published by Egmont in September 2007.
Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art offers scholars and students the first thorough and well-researched vehicle into John Berryman’s epic poem The Dream Songs. Through a close reading of the text, an examination of the history of its criticism and some of Berryman’s letters, notes, and pertinent manuscripts, Sam Dodson offers the reader a solid starting point to appreciate the presiding structure and thematic focus of this American classic. This structure, resulting from the poet’s crafting and the poem’s internal growth, is illustrated in the text by more than thirty reproductions of some of the Dream Song drafts in progress. No existing critical work examines anywhere near the number of individual Dream Songs as this reader’s guide, which will enable students and teachers to enter Berryman’s difficult poem with confidence and a proper sense of direction. Its purpose is to provide the beginning reader and the scholar with a map for approaching this large work and finding their way through its elegiac structure and appreciating its unity. A close look at the poem's language and stylistic innovations, epic qualities and author’s poetics, and most especially the elegiac movement of the poem, will allow even the novice reader to enter Henry’s world. The elegies as a whole provide the note of mourning that is at the core of Berryman’s epic.
The personal journals examined in Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent are not the witty, erudite, and gracefully written exercises that have drawn the attention of most biographers and literary scholars. Prosaic, ungrammatical, and poorly spelled, the fifteen surviving volumes of Henry Trent's hitherto unexamined diaries are nevertheless a treasure for the social and cultural historian. Henry Trent was born in England in 1826, the son of a British naval officer. When he was still a boy, his father decided to begin a new life as a landed gentleman and moved the family to Lower Canada. At the age of sixteen Trent began writing in a diary, which he maintained, intermittently, for more than fifty years. As a lonely youth he narrates days spent hunting and trapping in the woods owned by his father. On the threshold of manhood and in search of a vocation, he writes about his experiences in London and then on Vancouver Island during the gold rush. And finally, as the father of a large family, he describes the daily struggle to make ends meet on the farm he inherited in Quebec's lower St Francis valley. As it follows Trent through the different stages of his long life, Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent explores the complexities of class and colonialism, gender roles within the rural family, and the transition from youth to manhood to old age. The diaries provide a rare opportunity to read the thoughts and follow the experiences of a man who, like many Victorian-era immigrants of the privileged class, struggled to adapt to the Canadian environment during the rise of the industrial age.
