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.

This title explores cutting-edge approaches to literacy across cultures, contexts and disciplines. This volume examines the relationship between language and literacy from a systemic functional perspective. The book starts with a retrospective view on the development of language education practices, written by eminent linguistics Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and then shows how this approach is implemented today. The second section presents a detailed analysis of how considerations of literacy education are approached in educational systems around the world. The contributors examine issues such as metadiscourse, genre, cultural politics, and how systemic functional grammar can help to raise literacy standards. The final section looks at literacy in more specific disciplines, including history, literature, science and student writing. The essays collected here present a comprehensive analysis of language and literacy from a systemic functional perspective, written by academics at the forefront of the field. It will be of interest to researchers in systemic functional linguistics, or language and education.

If woman was already considered a baser being in medieval English literary culture, then what explains the monstrous women--part-animal, or magically-empowered--who function as typical romance heroines? If the monstrous women simply dramatize the conventions of medieval misogyny, then why do so many of them found dynasties, establish empires, and fill the royal seats across Europe with their offspring? A closer look at the figures of Constance, Medea, and Melusine in 14th, 15th, and early 16th-century English narratives reveals how metaphorical female monstrosity functions as a critical lens that allows authors, and audiences, to reflect on and re-examine misogynistic conventions, patriarchal authority, and the romance formula itself. Arguing that the Middle English romance constructs new possibilities for fiction, this study uses recent scholarship on monster theory and medieval women to theorize the presence of these monstrous women in medieval romance, discovering how they trace the formulation of a distinct gender ideology and expose the flaws of a literary rhetoric that, in defining the female as Other to the normative male, makes women into monsters.

This seminal work on what literacy truly means in the 21st century is filled with big, meaningful ideas. The purpose of this book is not to replace the three Rs, but to expand them to a model for literacy that applies to classrooms which are shape-shifting under the pressures of converging conditions. This is a must-read for all educators!

- Expose meaning from global interactive, multimedia, electronic cybraries

- Employ information for solving challenges and constructing information

- Express ideas compellingly and fluently through technology to a diverse audience

This resource features an associated Wiki web page where readers can access presentation slides, links to blog entries about redefining literacy from the edu-blogosphere, online handouts for conference presentations and workshops, various files associated with this book, and regularly updated web links that have started with Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century.

The postmodern force resembles a violent gushing torrent that washes away almost every man-made artifact of modernity. Literacy education and research, without exception, have been profoundly influenced by this force. The project of critical literacy seems revolutionary and ambitious. It claims to be critical, empowering, and emancipatory. Hence, the central concern of this book is: can critical literacy within the postmodern framework justify its claim? Are there any criticisms of postmodernism? What is lacking in it? Is there an alternative? How does this alternative paradigm address and overcome the limitations of postmodernism? How can critical literacy be critical, empowering, and emancipatory within the alternative paradigm? And what does this alternative paradigm imply in relation to literacy pedagogy? These and other questions are explored in this book. The analysis should be accessible and helpful to those who are interested in the theoretical grounding for critical literacy. Literacy educators will also find the discussion of pedagogical implications useful in informing their practices.

This brief book focuses on the Gothic elements that help to shape and define literature of the American South and on how these elements are incorporated into Southern literature through overt use of the grotesque. After exploring the foundations of what may be loosely termed the Southern Grotesque, this work analyzes two literary themes that have played major roles in the evolution of Southern fiction, which often centers on women and the roles they play in Southern society: coming-of-age themes and motherhood themes. Coming-of-age themes trace the lives of adolescent girls who grow up in Southern culture, come of age spiritually in the South, and search for identity, while motherhood themes track the influence (both productive and destructive) of Southern women who are thrust into motherhood. This book also examines the Grotesque and Gothic connections among the authors of Southern literature, in particular Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery OConnor, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. These writers of the grotesque tradition have influenced my own novel-writing, to which I refer in the last chapter, a study of the creative process.

The Length of Light reflects the predicament of everyday choices in life. The enigmatic gap between ordinary people and their dreams is dramatized in scenes that reveal severed roots, patriarchal intrusions, socio-economic impositions, inhuman cultural values, and hostility. Yet the redeeming qualities of each character give hope and faith as they hold on to their insurmountable will to survive. In their diverse themes and tenors, the narratives demonstrate a critical examination of a world in which most people, against their wishes, are chosen by the paths they follow: Kaito, the protagonist in Sirens puts his family in debt to achieve his desperate desire to migrate to the United States. He is, however, shocked to realize that America is far from the place he imagines it to be. Soka, in the story Idu, is on the other hand, haunted by a cultural belief she dismisses: she encounters the very mythical story she rebuffs, and in the process, history becomes her story.

"To give symphonic shape to verbal narrative"--this was the main target Anthony Burgess set for himself before writing the Napoleon Symphony. Himself being a composer, music played a prominent role in his life, and Burgess did not separate these two fields of art, rather tried to approximate them as much as possible. Burgess never deterred from experimenting, he was famous for his strong and original linguistic power with which he wrote his novels. One of his main sources for inspiration was music. In this book the author examines two novels, A Clockwork Orange and the Napoleon Symphony from Burgess's oeuvre from a special point of view. The book presents how music and especially how symphonic structure appear in the two novels and in Burgess's art. Can music teach anything to a novelist? What is a postmodern writer might learn from this art? These questions are being answered in this book.

Drug, alcohol, sex, relationships, togetherness, loneliness, literature, obscenity, homosexuality, wandering, homelessness, art, thousands of corrupted angels, freedom, limitation, liberation, friendship, poetry, a movement. The spell that Beat literature still casts upon us originates in the elementary: our human wish for being free from human limitations. Is spiritual liberation a state that can be reached at all? Howl has the answer in it. After presenting a historical, social and literal glimpse into the era of the American Beat generation, this book offers a guide to the Beat bible that is Howl by Allen Ginsberg. The main motif along which the work analyzes Ginsberg's poem is spiritual liberation. Though apparently the Beats seem to be free from for example society, it is quesionable whether they could find their wished state of perfect freedom. The spell of Ginsberg is especially powerfull in our world of apparently no limits where all the fights had already been fought instead of us. If only we could be our own freedom fighters, too.

Literature textbooks used in secondary schools in Alberta reflect the belief that not only does literature have the power to change and shape our thinking, but also that the non-White voices of the culture need to be heard if Canada is to become a country which truly welcomes and values cultural diversity. The realization that many high school students in the Crowsnest Pass area of Southern Alberta held negative stereotypes about Canadian Aboriginal people prompted this study which measured how effective studying literature written by Aboriginal writers was in reducing prejudice. Within each grade, individual students showed significant attitude changes. In all grades, female students had significantly lower scores than males, both pre - and post-test, evidence that there are perhaps different stages of moral development in females than males. Qualitative data revealed an increased understanding of Aboriginal issues and student attempts to view the world from a non-White perspective. This study documents successful and unsuccessful methods of combating racism in the classroom and will be valuable to teachers and all those planning to work with children.

Truman Capote became a controversial and much debated personality in the 20th century. The themes he elaborated in his works, the 'other' Gothic characters and motifs he presented in the short story collection as well as 'Other Voices, Other Rooms' are as fascinating in the present as they were in his era. Numerous readers rediscovered the sublime and ingenious universe Capote created. Today when the borders of surprise and cruelty were broadened to extremes cinematographic productions portraying Capote and his process of creating 'In Cold Blood 'enjoy international fame and admiration. This book offers a profound analysis as well as interpretation of the Gothic elements that pervaded the works of Capote as well as their possible source of inspiration rooted in the author's frustrated childhood and controversial adulthood. This study sheds light on the vivid imagination of the writer and his indisputable contribution to the enrichment of both American and world literature with numerous biographical references.

"Here's Our Child, Where's The Village?" conveys that every child deserves the opportunity to flourish as happy, thriving and free spirited people regardless of race and the displacement factors governing their lives. The question isn't "Here's Our Child, Where's The Village?" The question is whose village will you be? "We must bear each others burdens. Though the village has been replaced by concrete and Roe v. Wade, there remains innocent children deserving of love and a safe haven. They may be parentless, but they are not Godless..." -Bruce George, Co-Founder of Def Poetry Jam
"Connecting kids to permanency is paramount."
Stacia C. Hammond- Executive Director/Founder
Adoption Support & Consultation Services of Florida, Inc. (ASCS)

"It gives me great pleasure to pen the foreword for "Here's Our Child; Where's the Village?" and participate in the efforts of the Gumbo for the Soul project. The joy one gets from a child is indescribable, but something everyone can enjoy in one capacity or another; especially if we believe in the old African Proverb, it takes a village to raise a child." -Tee C Royal, founder of RAWSISTAZ Literary Group

Gumbo for The Soul Publications and logo are registered
trademarks of Beverly Black Johnson. All Right Reserved
www.gumboforthesoul.com

Proverbs 10: 14
Wise people treasure knowledge, but the babbling of a fool invites disaster.

In this work I intend to explore the impacts of the Oriental and Western values, trends and views of life in E. E. Cummings's art. Considering that he was an avant-garde poet and a Cubist painter, the avant-garde trends in his poetry are supposed to be analyzed; then, some features of Zen philosophy - which sometimes is called a religion, sometimes a way of thinking, or sometimes even a technique - are meant to be presented. Since haiku is the literary expression of Zen, the haiku pictures of E.E Cummings's poetry are one of my main topics. My aim is to explore the specificity of Cummings's poetry; since, he has found the common concepts of Zen and avant-garde trends, which - in a superficial comparison - seem to be strongly different from each other. Cummings's evergreen and unique approach to letters, his experiments with the expressive power of the fragmented words and the fragmented experience lying behind the letter-particles can repeatedly delight everyone who is interested in the mysterious process of creation.

When Latin-American drama professor Frank Dauster brought Mexican poet and playwright Xavier Villaurrutia (1903-1950) to the attention of the English-reading public in 1971, more than two decades had passed since Villaurrutia's death. Known to a Spanish-speaking audience as a poet concerned with death, Villaurrutia wrote both poetry and drama. However, his first full-length play, Invitacin a la Muerte, in 1947 marked the height of his dramatic career. The effort to connect the play to William Shakespeare's Hamlet brings Villaurrutia's work into a curious relationship with the famous tragedy. As this book reveals, Villaurrutia's reliance on Shakespeare permits him to dramatize the anguish affecting humankind in the twentieth century. This agony is at the center of Alberto's discomfort, intensified by the elements around which a modern-day Gertrude, Ophelia, Claudius, Horatio, and Polonius must grapple. When we confront Alberto, we see into the heart of the modern dilemma, a struggle not far from Shakespeare's Elsinore.

Within The House on Mango Street, Cisneros weaves several subtle literary allusions, mostly from fairy tales, into many of her vignettes. These subtle allusions help Cisneros create a portrait of expected feminine roles, mostly women as victims, within the patriarchal community, which, when juxtaposed with Esperanza's ideals for herself and her inner strength and drive, help distinguish her as different from those around her. Because she is different and stronger than the other women in her community, Esperanza will be able to reject the other female role models presented by both the women in her community and the women in the fairy tales she has been inundated with her entire life. The rejection of the models that have been presented to her will allow her to instead create her own story where she will be able to 'live happily ever after' on her own terms and not to rely on waiting for someone else to save her. Her escape will allow her to finally escape the poverty and oppression of her community, but will also give her the strength to return to save the other women from similar trappings, thereby becoming their figurative Prince Charming.

In mid twentieth century Britain, after the experience of total war, evil was not an abstract concept but a palpable reality. How was evil understood, and how did this understanding influence notions of English national identity? This book examines the lives and works of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien, members of the British literary club Inklings. It probes representations of evil, Englishness, gender and the erotic in their fiction and shows specifically how their science fiction, horror, and fantasy was a response to the moral and human devastation of two world wars. The book suggests that the Inkling's middle brow literature opens a window on a wider sense of uncertainty and longing about Englishness in the eve of decolonization and decline, while showing that the philosophical and theological make up of the group was more diverse than has been previousely represented.

This book follows the interaction of "double-voicing" and "double-consciousness" in Native American literary history. It begins with the surviving records from the time of colonial contact and ends with works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Thomas King, two contemporary authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance. "Double-voicing" is a common feature found in many works preserved by early anthropologists from various Native American oral traditions. However, after colonial contact this feature largely disappears from literary works written by Native American authors, when it is replaced by the societal condition "double-consciousness." With the revitalization of cultural knowledge in the mid-twentieth-century, Native authors also revitalize their rhetorical techniques in their writing and the "double-voice" feature re-emerges coupled with a bicultural awareness that is carried over from "double-consciousness."

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.