Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ursula K. LeGuin, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine...

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from...

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from...

From time to time a current of thought sweeps through a culture and moves its most disparate elements in the same direction. Such a current is structuralism. Reacting against "modernist" alienation and fragmentation, it is an integrative and holistic way of looking at the world; it seeks reality not in individual things but in the relationships among them. Its aim, says Robert Scholes, is nothing less than the unification of all the sciences into a new system of belief.
The impact of structuralism on literature and literary study is the concern of this extraordinarily lucid book. Mr....

"Accessible yet challenging, this book will be the indispensable introductory text for semiotics--indeed for any theoretical course in the humanities and social sciences that deals with the theory of these disciplines."--Choice
"The book offers . . . a clutch of examples of semiotics usefully and intelligently applied, which Schole's patient, cheerful tone and his resolutely concrete vocabulary manage to combine into a breezily informative American confection."--Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement
"This critique demonstrates once more that Scholes . . . is one of...

"Robert Scholes has written an enviable book on the uses and abuses of literary theory in the teaching of literature. One of his] most forceful points...is that 'literary theory' is not something a teacher may either 'use' or not use, for teaching itself is an unavoidably theoretical activity."--Gerald Graff, Novel
"Scholes' emphasis in Textual Power is indicated by the book's subtitle. After a provocative analysis of disciplinary values and departmental tendencies... he] proposes that 'we must stop "teaching literature" and start studying texts'...His book is essential for...

Discussing a wide range of literary theory in a clear and accessible way, prize-winning author Robert Scholes here continues his ongoing construction of a humane semiotic approach to the problems of reading, writing, and teaching. Taking the view that "all the world's a text," Scholes considers numerous texts from life and literature, including photographs, paintings, and television commercials as well as biographies and novels.
"A significant and thoughtful effort to think about the responsibilities of reading in the wake of deconstruction."--Choice
Protocols of Reading...

Ernest Hemingway has long been regarded as a fiercely heterosexual writer who advocated and embodied an exaggerated masculinity. This witty and intelligent book, the first to focus exclusively on gender in Hemingway's writing, presents a new view of the author, demonstrating that issues of gender and sexuality are more complex and subtle in his work than has ever been imagined.
Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes reread the Hemingway Text--his published and unpublished writing and what is known about his life--and show that gender was one of his conscious preoccupations. They explore the...

In this lively, personal book, Robert Scholes intervenes in ongoing discussions about modernism in the arts during the crucial half-century from 1895 to 1945. While critics of and apologists for modernism have defined modern art and literature in terms of binary oppositions--high/low, old/new, hard/soft, poetry/rhetoric--Scholes contends that these distinctions are in fact confused and misleading. Such oppositions are instances of "paradoxy"--an apparent clarity that covers real confusion.
Closely examining specific literary texts, drawings, critical writings, and memoirs, Scholes seeks to...