Much can be learned about both the historic and human impact of war by studying the literary output associated with the time period during and immediately after the event. This casebook help students build bridges between WWI history and the fictional accounts provided by such works as All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, and A Son at the Front. For each work, insightful analysis and historical contextualization is provided. This unique casebook approach adds another layer of understanding for readers by relating the fiction to primary documents...
Much can be learned about both the historic and human impact of war by studying the literary output associated with the time period during and imme...
Winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and specifically cited by the Swedish Academy when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, "The Old Man and the Sea" remains one of the author's most beloved works. This casebook helps readers interpret and appreciate the thematic concerns of the novel, as well as the contextual issues it explores.
Topic chapters provide information on Cuba, including its natural geography, sociopolitical history, and the ethnic background of its people. A wide variety of primary documents such as interviews and articles, along with charts...
Winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and specifically cited by the Swedish Academy when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature ...
In America, the long 1950s were marked by an intense skepticism toward utopian alternatives to the existing capitalist order. This skepticism was closely related to the climate of the Cold War, in which the demonization of socialism contributed to a dismissal of all alternatives to capitalism. This book studies how American novels and films of the long 1950s reflect the loss of the utopian imagination and mirror the growing concern that capitalism brought routinization, alienation, and other dehumanizing consequences. The volume relates the decline of the utopian vision to the rise of late...
In America, the long 1950s were marked by an intense skepticism toward utopian alternatives to the existing capitalist order. This skepticism was c...
One of Shakespeare's most delightful plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream enchants audiences and readers with its celebration of magic, dreams, and love. This casebook begins by establishing the dramatic and literary concerns of the play. Four historical context chapters consider attitudes toward gender relations, social distinctions, popular culture, and imagination in Shakespeare's time, revealing contemporary issues and debates reflected in the comedy. Each unit is supported by primary historical documents, including pamphlets and proclamations. A discussion of performance and interpretation...
One of Shakespeare's most delightful plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream enchants audiences and readers with its celebration of magic, dreams, and love. ...
While The Tempest has always been one of Shakespeare's most entertaining and enchanting plays, it continues to stir up passionate debate throughout the world because of its ideas and attitudes toward race, class, political power, and colonialism. This casebook systematically examines these issues, as well as several others, from dramatic and historical perspectives and through parallel contemporary applications. Readers are first introduced to the play with a dramatic analysis that situates the work within Shakespeare's canon and within the romantic tradition. This fresh...
While The Tempest has always been one of Shakespeare's most entertaining and enchanting plays, it continues to stir up passionate debate thr...
Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country" is one of the most influential works of South African literature. Appearing at a time when the South African political system was being increasingly questioned, the novel drew worldwide attention to the horrors of apartheid, a political institution promoting segregation and discrimination. This book overviews Paton's novel and its social and political contexts. It discusses South African history and provides a sample of documents related to the origin of apartheid and the challenges facing South Africans under the segregationist regime. In doing so,...
Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country" is one of the most influential works of South African literature. Appearing at a time when the South Africa...
Migration's impact on German society has been dramatic. Indeed, key political events in modern German history cannot be fully understood without reference to migration's influence. Domestic and international affairs were greatly affected by the millions of ethnic Germans who were either expelled from the homelands or arrived as refugees during and after the Second World War. The construction (and later the fall) of the Berlin Wall would not have occurred without the massive emigration of refugees from the German Democratic Republic. And without the Wall, there would have been less reason...
Migration's impact on German society has been dramatic. Indeed, key political events in modern German history cannot be fully understood without re...
This new critical volume offers a fresh, multifaceted assessment of Robert Frost's life and works. Nearly every aspect of the poet's career is treated: his interest in poetics and style; his role as a public figure; his deep fascination with science, psychology, and education; his peculiar and difficult relation to religion; his investments, as thinker and writer, in politics and war; the way he dealt with problems of mental illness that beset his sister and two of his children; and, finally, the complex geo-political contexts that inform some of his best poetry. Contributors include a number...
This new critical volume offers a fresh, multifaceted assessment of Robert Frost's life and works. Nearly every aspect of the poet's career is treated...
Bringing together a group of established and emergent Jonson scholars, this volume reacts to major advances in thinking about the writer and his canon of works. The study is divided into two distinct parts: the first considers the Jonsonian career and output from biographical, critical, and performance-based angles; the second looks at cultural and historical contexts building on rich interdisciplinary work. Social historians work alongside literary critics to provide a diverse and varied account of Jonson. These are less standard surveys of the field than vibrant interventions into current...
Bringing together a group of established and emergent Jonson scholars, this volume reacts to major advances in thinking about the writer and his canon...
Few authors benefit from being set in their contemporary context more than Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson in Context is a guide to his world, offering readers a comprehensive account of eighteenth-century life and culture as it relates to his work. Short, lively and eminently readable chapters illuminate not only Johnson's own life, writings and career, but the literary, critical, journalistic, social, political, scientific, artistic, medical and financial contexts in which his works came into being. Written by leading experts in Johnson and in eighteenth-century studies, these chapters offer...
Few authors benefit from being set in their contemporary context more than Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson in Context is a guide to his world, offering...
