Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Study & Teaching

As I Lay Dying is considered by many both the most enigmatic and the most accessible of Faulkner's major works. It is also the most dramatic; the journey of the Bundrens, a family of poor farmers in the South in the early twentieth century, unfolds like a one-act play, full of natural disaster and human madness. Taught in high school, college, and graduate courses, the novel lends itself to a wide range of interpretations, posing both challenges and opportunities for the instructor.

Part 1 of this Approaches volume, "Materials," offers an extensive guide to reference materials...

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been celebrated as the period of conversation. Salons flourished and became an important social force. Women and men worked together, in dialogue with their contemporaries, other texts, and their culture to create novels, political satire, drama, poetry, fairy tales, travel narratives, and philosophy. Yet the inclusion of women's contributions, only recently recovered, changes the way we conceive of the period that constitutes one of the building blocks of French national identity and Western civilization, and teachers are often unsure how and...

The poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) came on the literary scene in the 1910s as a young American expatriate living in England. Her early lyric poems, in Sea Garden, helped launch the free verse movement known as imagism. Her work as a whole, spanning five decades, includes long narrative poems, novels, memoirs, and translations. Her experience of the two world wars in Europe is felt throughout her oeuvre, much of which focuses on the power and destructiveness of war. Other recurring topics are ancient models of civilization, comparative mythology, and female deities suppressed in the...

Naguib Mahfouz is the Arab world's best-known writer and the single most important chronicler and analyst of twentieth-century Egypt. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, and since then his work has been increasingly studied in North American university classrooms. This first volume in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature to focus on an Arab author or Arabic literature provides an introduction to Mahfouz.

In part 1, "Materials," the editors discuss Mahfouz's background, influence, and critical reception. In part 2, "Approaches," the volume's...