English Language & Literature: Books

Focusing on texts written between 1880 and 1930, Mary McAleer Balkun explores the concept of the "counterfeit," both in terms of material goods and invented identities, and the ways that the acquisition of objects came to define individuals in American culture and literature.Balkun provides new readings of traditional texts such as The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The House of Mirth, as well as readings of less-studied texts

This introduction to American literature and culture from 1900 to 1960 is organized around four major ideas about America: that is it "big", "new", "rich", and "free". Juxtaposes discussion of history, popular culture, literature and other art forms in ways that foster discussion, questioning, and continued study.

Edgar Howard Schuster devotes his book to better ways of teaching grammar, usage, writing, and punctuation by teaching the unbreakable rules in such a way that they stay taught debunking the "myth rules" that are commonly taught in class, but infrequently followed in practice trusting students' own intuitive sense of grammaticality appealing to the evidence of the work of his own and others' students and to the best contemporary writing.

Invisible, marginal, expected - these words trace the path of recognition for American Indian literature written in English since the late eighteenth century. This Companion chronicles and celebrates that trajectory by defining relevant institutional, historical, cultural, and gender contexts, by outlining the variety of genres written since the 1770s, and also by focusing on significant authors who established a place for Native literature in literary canons in the 1970s

In this comprehensive examination of Chicano and Chicana literature, Charles M. Tatum brings a new and refreshing perspective to the ethnic identity of Mexican Americans. From the earliest sixteenth-century chronicles of the Spanish Period, to the poetry and narrative fiction of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and then to the flowering of all literary genres in the post-Chicano Movement years,

This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents

A sequel and companion to Bernard Bell's 1987 work, The Afro-American Novel, expanding the coverage to 2001 and examining the writings and traditions of a remarkably wide array of black novelists.

In this engaging and reflective essay, Jerry Griswold examines the unique qualities of childhood experience and their reappearance as frequent themes in children's literature.

This book discusses many of the controversial issues surrounding multicultural literature for children and young adults. Throughout its discussion, the book makes extensive references to a large body of multicultural fiction and provides a thorough review of research on this important topic.

Updated and revised, the sixth edition shows undergraduates how to use their research time efficiently and how to locate and evaluate material available from electronic databases and the Internet.