The aim of this book is to present the biggest wonder in life - birth. But though one should think about life-birth at this point, the emphasis will not be on this kind of conception. Two kinds of creation are shown in these novels. In Frankenstein it is the scientist who would like to bring to life a creature, while in Brave New World society uses cloning to determine the number of inhabitants in society. Another similarity can be mentioned that these two methods simply leave out women of creation, men want to achieve their goal without women as partners. Why do they desire so? Why is it so important to attain the capability of creation solely by men? Nowadays, the two novels are mentioned together as the possible-near-future. And also the question arises: can human play the role of God?

The pleasure of reading digital narrative fiction resides in our sense of being immersed in a fictional universe populated by life-like characters, and where situations and events unfold in a plot allowing us to reenact the vicissitudes of the story in our minds as we read. What happens to this sense of immersion when the narrative consists of animated, interactive, multimodal text, is displayed on a computer screen, and when we click on hyperlinks and scroll with a computer mouse, instead of leafing through the pages of a print book while reading unyielding text on paper? This study explores the impact of technical and material features of the reading device - the computer and the print book - on our sense of being emotionally, cognitively, and phenomenologically immersed in a narrative fiction. Far from being transparent displays of narratives, the medium and technology in question play a crucial role for our reading experience.

Promote some of today's best and most popular YA books-both fiction and nonfiction- with these ready-to-use booktalks and creative learning extension ideas. Whether you are a public or school librarian, teacher, or teen group leader, you'll find this guide helpful in motivating teens to read, and keeping them engaged. It features background information on the books, booktalks, and related activities for more than 100 titles released between 2003 and 2008, but focusing especially on those published in the past 3 years. New to this volume are indicators for titles with strong appeal to teen boys and teen girls, as well as those that cross genders in their appeal. Grades 6-12.

The Self-Fashioning of Oliver Cromwell provides a close analysis of Cromwell's letters and speeches. It assesses the influence of Cromwell's Puritan faith, and evaluates Cromwell's role in the main public arenas of his life. The work also examines the significance of the title 'Lord Protector', and discusses Cromwell's acceptance of that title. Self-fashioning theory is employed to highlight the ways in which Cromwell fashioned himself in opposition to threatening Others. The book also discusses the ways in which the parameters of Cromwell's time, such as the religious and political environment, influenced his self-fashioning. The final chapter explores the relationship between Cromwell's self-fashioning and his public image. This book will be of interest to historians, to literary scholars, for those concerned with self-fashioning, and to the general reader.

Roots is more than the saga of Alex Haley's family, by means of his novel the author has managed to put slavery in a new light as well. With the help of his protagonist, Kunta Kinte, he was able to highlight such aspects of slavery which were not mentioned before. While analysing Haley's brilliant work, my aim was to focus on the American-born and the African-born slaves' relationship, which is tensioned during the whole novel though both of them live under the same oppression. I have tried to investigate what is the source of the lack of understanding each other and their common disrespect, which usually characterises the African born and the American born slaves' relationships. Besides this interesting point of the novel, my work also elaborates another remarkable aspect of the slaves' character, which seems to be a great burden for them; the American-born slaves' rootlessness and the African-born slaves' double identity. I would recommend this book for those who are interested in the history of slavery and in Haley's work as well and they would like to know not only the surface but also the underlying reasons and motivations of the slaves' behaviour and actions.

This book investigates the complex genesis of the play printed in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 as 'The first Part of Henry the Sixt'. It begins by anchoring the present volume in the wider context of authorship theory and attribution studies before examining the external and internal evidence for the play's date. It is demonstrated that it is only by carrying out a full structural analysis of the play that we can hope to disentangle and accurately appraise the various revision theories put forward by scholars over the centuries. The author then conducts the first comprehensive assessment of Gary Taylor's groundbreaking 1995 authorship hypothesis for the play, and modifies it significantly before concluding that 'The first Part of Henry the Sixt' is Shakespeare's revision of the play that appears in Philip Henslowe's Diary as 'harey the vj'; a play written by Thomas Nashe (Act 1) and an anonymous playwright (Acts 2-5) for Lord Strange's company and first performed at the Rose theatre on 3 March 1592. This book will appeal to all students of Shakespeare, especially those interested in his earliest beginnings as a playwright.

More than 20 years before his death, Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925 - 1986) took a vow of silence that he honored for all but a handful of his remaining years. Unfortunately, this silence has seemingly made it easy to dismiss Kaufman in favor of self-promoting Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. A growing number of scholars, however, are taking the time to reexamine the poetry of Bob Kaufman. As they do, they propose various explanations for his silence, which infects both his poetry and his biography. This book offers a new theory. It argues for a historical reading. It posits that Kaufman uses silence to respond to the oppressive conformity of the mid-twentieth century. By remaining obscure, Kaufman rejects the suburban middle-class value system of the time and prohibits the reader from placing him within taxonomies based on class, race, and gender. As such, Kaufman forces the reader to start from scratch when asking questions about identity. Jazz, then, becomes the ideal tool for Kaufman because it works through spontaneity and improvisation and the defeat of embedded forms and structures.

This book is a self-analysis of Shelley Robinson's own act of creative writing. In a (modified) think-aloud protocol, Robinson metacognitively reflects upon her own act of writing, working in three rhetorical forms of writing: 1) a poem (imaginative); 2) a journal entry (expressive); and 3) an article (transactional). During this research, she expands the concept of metacognition to become "meta-processing" in order to better communicate her reflexive experience. She broadens metacognition (thinking) to include four other meta-learning domains: (meta-conative motivational], meta-affective feeling], meta-spiritual inspirational]) and meta-kinaesthetic body connection]). As well, there appear to be ideas about writing that are representative of both process and post-process writing (and related) theories. These contrasting schools of thought about writing do not appear to be mutually exclusive in her encounters with text and in the writing and reflections of other published writers. This research is a work that considers many theories of writing and resonates with other writers.

This book provides a useful account of the reception of John Ford in the Romantic Period. It argues that the three fundamental causes of the revival of Shakespeare - that is, the rise in historical criticism, the influence of Longinus, and the endeavour to reinforce Englishness - were echoed in the revival and reception of Ford in the period.

Traditional instruction in the social studies has been content rather than process oriented, concentrating on the lower level thinking skills. With coverage of the culture and history of the fifty United States, "Reading the Fifty States" offers librarians and teachers the tools to encourage higher order thinking skills. Students read novels set in each of the states and participate in targeted reader-response activities that are process oriented, develop higher cognitive skills, and spark creativity. Helpful tools include 200 booktalks (4 for each state), lists of other recommended titles for each state, a fact sheet, a listing of the national standards covered, and a plethora of reproducible, reader-response activities directly linked to national standards in language arts and social studies. Grades 3-6

Some children need a lot of help if they're ever going to learn to read. But what's the best way to help them? How can you get your child to read if he just doesn't like books? And what if you don't read much yourself? This book has the answers. Barrington Stoke specialises in books for reluctant, struggling and dyslexic readers.

This book presents a study that explored the metacognitive reading strategies used by Arabic native speakers when reading in Arabic and English. The study aimed at finding out 1)the strategies that Arabic native speakers report using in English and Arabic,2)the strategies they actually use in reading the two languages, and 3)the conditions under which the use of these strategies vary across the two languages. The participants' metacognitive reading strategies was assessed by using the Survey of Reading Strategies(SORS) (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002) while their actual strategies use was identified through the use of a think-aloud protocol. The results revealed five major findings. First, all the participants reported using all the SORS strategies.Second, there were statistically significant differences in the strategies reported in English and Arabic. Third, some strategies were actually used more often than others. Fourth, think- aloud showed that the participants actually used more than half of the strategies when they read in English. Finally, the variations in reported use revealed that more strategies were used in English than in Arabic.

'The Case for Cummings' shows how E.E. Cummings has become fixed in criticism due to a misreading of his work by critics. Many critics in the 1920s were hostile to Cummings, forcing Cummings supporters to either defend or apologise for him. Thus, in the 1920s pro-Cummingsian critics defined and fixed the battleground' - collectively collating Cummings themes - love, spring, satire, individualism, and transcendence yet these areas became the very source of attack from anti-Cummingsian critics. This investigation, utilizing the literary theories of Derrida, Bakhtin, Foucault, Bloom, and Cixous, among others, aims to show how both sides have misread Cummings work and in doing so sees a new Cummings emerge, a Cummings who appears less fixed in criticism, who is more complex and richer in scope than first thought, and whose work demands major re-evaluation.

Do they ""get it""? Are students mastering information literacy? ACRL's standards for information literacy provide a solid foundation to help faculty and librarians establish the context for learning. Neely, a top information literacy expert, frames these ACRL standards as benchmarks and provides a toolbox of assessment strategies to demonstrate students' learning. Sharing best practices and actual sample assessments, these proven materials and programs: represent best practices from 27 institutions (US, Canadian, Australian); exemplify the best library-related assignments to strengthen information literacy skills; offer proven tips for incorporating the five ACRL standards into instruction; go beyond the classroom, with insights on partnering with teachers and administrators; and, explain the basics of automating assessments.

Literacy discourses is an ethnographic study concerned with people's use and representations of literacy in two residential quarters in Distrito Federal, the federation district within which is the capital city of Brazil. It is a detailed description of situated literacies in particular domains such as home and community, and it involves knowing literacy practices at both individual and social level. Besides, it is a critical explanation of how these literacies relate to other domains such as work and school. Informal ways of learning literacy are also given attention as part of the everyday use. An integration between the New Literacy Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis is made for the study of literacy as discourse in the link between local settings and global practices. As a main proposition, these situated literacies are classified as lifeworld and systems literacies, derived from Habermas's theory. This classification is meant to show the advantage of providing ways to understand relationships between vernacular and dominant literacies, which do not figure as discrete elements but exist in hybrid practices.

This is the story of Maggie, in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Since several different versions of Maggie exist on page, stage and screen, this essay investigates the step by step changes and improvements in the shaping of one of the main characters. The 1974 drama version of Maggie was picked and analysed in details while the character was then compared to her versions among them the one in the famous 1958 film. This is done partly with the help of the appropriate quotations. Through this work a very profound insight can be gained into the working method of the author, how he shaped and formed the character of Maggie. It highlights how Maggies personality had to be altered in the film and what were the reasons for that. The conclusion emphasises how sympathetic she initially was and how even more likeable she became in later versions. This work may appeal to those interested in the working process of a playwright, who love this play of Williams and for anyone caring for literature.

This book aims at investigating whether teaching literature and teaching grammar can be integrated in second language teaching. In the literature review part of the work the first aim is to provide a summary of the studies that have dealt with the questions of why literature and grammar should be taught in the language classroom and especially how teachers should teach them. Since there is hardly any literature on how these two areas can be integrated, the aim is to find those points where the two language teaching areas can be combined. In the second part of the book four activities are introduced to show possible ways how theory can be put into practice in the language classroom. They are also implemented and, as the results show, they are regarded by the students as effective and motivating ways of teaching grammar through literature. The work should help shed some light on this new and exciting teaching area, and should be specially useful to teachers of English who may consider utilizing teaching grammar for teaching literature.

Through a balance of pedagogy and practice, Ellis gives teachers the skills and confidence they need to become better storytellers. The book includes dozens of great stories and classroom-tested lesson plans to help students improve reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. With better reading skills, students' ability to learn content will also improve. By telling their own stories students will also learn creative writing strategies.

The preface and introduction recount current research, while providing inspiration for teachers to learn and tell stories. Each subsequent chapter explores one content area, Reading, Math, Science, etc. There is also a series of interdisciplinary units. What makes this project unique is that each chapter offers several exciting, easy-to-learn stories and reproducible pages for a ready-to-use handouts. Lesson plans include detailed strategies for their application, as well as links to national learning standards. Grades K-6

Join Piggy Rae and her silly friends Bernie Bear, Tommy Turtle, Alistair McMoose and others in these engaging and interactive puppet skits that encourage both laughter and learning. This guide gives you everything you need for lively storytimes. In addition to ten complete scripts, you'll find literacy tips, preparatory checklists of materials and props needed, patterns, lists of books for literacy building displays, activities that relate to the story and promote early literacy, and take-home reproducibles for caregivers that help them reinforce the six early literacy skills. Designed for PreK-Grade 3, the puppet plays are perfect for in-house storytime settings and for community outreach projects. Grades PreK-3.

The Woman Question served as a catalyst in Kate Chopin's, Nella Larsen's, and Willa Cather's portrayal of the eroticized female body. The question evolved, in part, from Herbert Spencer's 1873 article "Psychology of the Sexes" and centered around Spencer's "theories" on woman's nature, her function, and her differences-biological, sexological, and sociological-from man. Chapter one historicizes the Woman Question by examining its influence in these three areas. Chapters two, three, and four analyze one novel by each author. Chopin's The Awakening introduces the literary study because it operates as a transitional text challenging the Cult of True Womanhood while simultaneously introducing the sexualized New Woman. In Larsen's Quicksand, the New Woman is conceptualized within a black female body, a body that boldly confronts racist notions of woman. Lastly, Cather questions heteropatriarchal hegemony through her eroticized, feminized landscape in O Pioneers . Although each author develops her heroine differently, all three construct strong female characters who energize the Woman Question debate, forcing a re-examination of it in ways ignored or unrealized before.

The idea and image of Englishness has changed a lot within the last decades. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has memorably observed, modern Britain is "more reflected in multiracial families, curry and the fiction of Zadie Smith than the Royal family, fish and chips, and Shakespeare?." This book analyses the works of two mixed-race English writers: Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith. Hanif Kurishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia was published in 1990, Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth a decade later in 2000. Both authors deal with questions of identity, racism and cultural hybridity amongst second- and third-generation immigrants living in England. The aim of this book is to show how the images of Englishness and the attitude towards hybridity have changed between 1990 and 2000. Whereas Kureishi's novel focuses primarily on racism, Smith portrays millennial London as a city where hybridity - either by birth or by experience - is an integral part of everyday life.