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.

You hold a book of good intensions in your hand. The problem is that the realization of these intensions, namely, reaching the Ideal determines the destiny of others in some cases. How far can go a scientist in reaching his ambitious strives? Is he allowed to use human beings as objects of his experiments? Can we accept the isolation imposed on innocent victims for the sake of scientific development? Should we agree with the fact that anything can be sacrificed in favour of a higher goal without any painful loss? You can have the chance to decide if you take a closer look into the tragical stories The Birthmark and Rappaccini's Daughter. Whatever conclusion you may come to, do not miss to pay attention to The Artist of the Beautiful and to his harmless handlings through the power of imagination and observation. Maybe it is more noble to admire the creatures of nature as he does. The question sounds like this: Is the artist able to reach his goal or will he remain a hopeless dreamer? Check it

Several studies exist on the topic of absurd dramas of the 20th century, but this book brings a new viewpoint, from which the reader can see the problem of menace from a different side. My book deals with the origin, the direction and the experience of menace in five of Harold Pinter's plays comparing with Franz Kafka's The Trial. In Pinter's plays menace comes from the outside world, from different places, disturbing the characters' safe lives in the room. The direction of the way of menace is convergent: from different places to a certain point, to the room. While in Kafka's novels menace comes from a certain invisible place and ensnares the village. The direction of menace is divergent: from a certain point to everywhere. This monograph should be useful to professionals and students in the field of English literature in the 20th century, or anyone else who is interested in the appearance of menace in literature.

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 book aims to present the power of the African American oral folk traditions. It shows how a simple folk song is able to embody past and present, family origins and cultural identity at the same time. In Song of Solomon Morrison calls the attention of the African American community to the fact that if they are unaware of their folk heritage they can never own a self-conscious identity. It has a paramount significance to know the past of the ancestors in the lives of both an individual and a whole community, too. This book follows Milkman's, the protagonist's, quest for self- and cultural identity. Morrison made a folk song adjusted to the plot of the novel that was used as a complement parallel to the development of Milkman's mature identity. The revival of the oral folk traditions makes the protagonist a self-conscious member of his community. In this book the reader can follow the development of Milkman's indentity parallel with the song, and can learn my final conclusion in broaden dimensions.

This book seeks to demonstrate how the experience of exile was reflected in the work of 20th century Czech writers. It does so by way of an examination of the respective responses of Jan Drabek and Jaroslav Vejvoda to two historical traumas: the 1948 Communist Coup and the failure of the Prague Spring in 1968. It argues that while both Drabek and Vejvoda employ typical aspects of exilic literature in their work, each of them provides a different reflection on exile according to the distinct social and political condition of his time. By analyses of these responses to historical trauma, this work emphasizes the transition from the external, social, and political approach of Drabek to the internal, private, and strictly non political position of Vejvoda.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane have been renowned for capturing the contradictory features of the American dream through their authentic and fascinating stories of two legendary fictitious American citizens. However, few studies have commented on how similar reporting techniques bridge the genre-specific differences of two of the most iconic pieces of 20th century American literature and cinematography. This book is the first of its kind: It offers a comparative analysis of the reporting techniques on the American dream, unfolding complex semiotic structures. The book casts light on the interplay between the three levels of reporting and the detective-style quest for the personality of Jay Gatsby and Charlie Kane, analyzing the ways the reporters' attitudes and twists of time and space manipulate the perception of the audience. The book can be as useful for scholars in American literature and cinematography as for psychologists and communications professionals, who might feel challenged to observe complex human interactions, while creating the missing pieces of the highly fragmented puzzle in The Great Gatsby's and Citizen Kane's storylines.

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.

Germany's first democracy, the Weimar Republic, affected every aspect of life, particularly for women, who were granted such rights as the right to vote and equal pay for equal work. These rapid advancements combined with a strong economy and an increasing interest in popular culture, such as movies and sports, made possible the media creation of the New Woman. This book discusses four major works of the period--two dramas by Ernst Toller and two novels by Irmgard Keun--in terms of their portrayal of gender, both of traditional masculinity and femininity and of newer attitudes brought out in the period of the Neue Sachlichkeit. The analysis will explore what made the New Woman "new" and the reasons why she was never a reality for most German women. This book should be useful to those interested in German history, literature, and women's studies.

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.

The American Dream Reconsidered addresses readers of Shakespearean and American literature alike. This study aims to re-position William Shakespeare's The Tempest in world literature, using and re-interpreting Leo Marx's thesis that The Tempest may be considered "a prologue to American literature." Focusing on The Tempest in the first half of her work, the author points out novel aspects of the play that may be connected to the European experience of the New World, prefiguring even the concept of the later American dream. The chapters that follow the analysis of the Shakespearean play take a glimpse at American literary history and outline how the previously examined three major components-time, nature and magic-appear in the American literary heritage up to the present. The examples presented are by authors from Washington Irving to Sandra Cisneros, and include a profound analysis of Linda Hogan's Power, the novel that, as Limpr argues, indicates the start of a new process in American literature by opposing the intense myth destruction of the past two centuries and re-creating the myth.

This dissertation provides a study of the anticipatory signs of the emerging postcolonial consciousness in three mid-century novels of the African Diaspora: Camara Laye's The Dark Child, Margaret Walker's Jubilee, and Orlando Patterson's Die the Long Day. Inspired by Genevive Fabre and Robert O'Meally who have highlighted how African-American cultural producers revise history through lieux de mmoires, this analysis argues that these three transnational writers- respectively from West Africa, the United States and Jamaica - reclaim in their "willfully" constructed sites their past that had been marginalized and distorted in documents authorizing history. Paying careful attention to the context of their utterances and their intertextual relationships with antecendent Euro-centered traditional histories and fictions, this study attempts to show how these writers of the African Diaspora supplant the representational practices, counter the ideological discourses, and correct the misrepresentations embedded in "colonial" textuality. In addition, it examines the various tools these three writers employ to reclaim effectively their history. Whereas Laye utilizes narrative voice to shape his autobiographical novel into a lieu de mmoire, Margaret Walker employs music as an unassailable tool of reconstructive history, and Orlando Patterson crafts sociological data into his literary structure

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.

Inspire your middle school readers with these awesome reading motivation programs and proven book recommendations! * Written by a seasoned middle school librarian who knows what kids love to read * Step-by-step directions for battle of the books and other sure-fire reading motivation programs * Chocked full of titles to turn middle-schoolers into avid readers * Includes bonus reproducibles for your very own reading promotion programs * Annotated genre bibliographies to motivate middle school readers Meet the reading needs of a diverse school population, one in transition between elementary and the high school years and learn to have fun while getting serious about promoting Voluntary Free Reading (VFR) in your school. Frustrated librarians and teachers will get excellent examples of reading motivation programs and recommended, sure-to-please reading lists for hard-to-motivate middle grade students. This book is meant to be a resource for the librarian who must respond to the student who asks, "Do you have any good books?"

The nineteenth century was a time of fundamental changes in British society. The great Victorian writer Thomas Hardy reflects upon this time of transition by creating a setting for his regional novels which is much more than a mere background to the narration. Over the years his perception and representation of nature and landscape changes, partly influenced by the findings of Charles Darwin, partly caused by the effects of the Industrial Revolution. This book analyses regional elements in three of Hardy's novels, namely Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). It shows why and how he moves away from the pastoral to a more realistic depiction of rural English society. Aspects that will be looked at in greater detail are the oppositions of country and town, tradition and change, social acceptance and exclusion, dialect speech and standard English and the relationship between external and internal nature. This book is of interest to scholars of Thomas Hardy and English literature but it also appeals to anyone wanting to gain some deeper insight into the development of the novel in the nineteenth century.

The Lord of the Rings has evoked serious debates among practically all levels of literary society from mere reader to literary critic, tutor to biographer, devoted admirer to simple imitator. J. R. R. Tolkiens masterpiece has been provoking endless disputes about the possible literary origins of its elements, just as well as about the literary category with which it may be characterise, since it was published . In this work, the reader may discover the way and the extent to which certain character-level elements of the literary affiliates of myths, legends and fairy-tales effected the creation of such important characters in Tolkiens classic as Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, and Wizards. Besides, the most prominent features of The Lord of the Rings based on which this book can be characterised as fantasy will also be presented, together with a comprehensive description of this literary mode.

Nation and identity are two of the catchwords of cultural politics. Discourses related to these concepts have ever been especially pertinent to Scotland, owing to the nations complex relationship with England. Throughout the intricate political affairs that bound these nations to one another, Scotland has looked for distinctive ways to express itself, resulting in displays of national identity peppered with Scottish images. While their representations vary, their continued use proves them to be vital to the nations imagination. This study examines the concept of national identity in Scottish literature of the twentieth century by focusing on the portrayal of aspects of national relevance and their contribution to the creation of Scottishness in selected novels by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Muriel Spark and Alasdair Gray. The representations of Scottish identity that are explored in the texts are not the images of a common national ideal, nor are they standards to which the images must conform in order to be Scottish. This study rather evaluates various facets which provide the space of the discourses that constitute national identity.

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.

From the death of the last great medieval monarch, Henry V, until the ascendancy of Henry Tudor as Henry VII, England underwent a long and bloody transition from feudal kingdom to early modern state. Shakespeare's minor tetralogy is the story of this metamorphosis and 1 Henry VI is its beginning chapter. The language and action of 1 Henry VI reflect the legal foundations of feudal England at the point when those underpinnings were beginning to disintegrate. This dissolution is represented through four subplots that emphasize the characters as personae mixtae - private individuals and legal entities - within feudal England's socio-political structure. This study is the first of its kind to analyze Shakespeare's English history plays in terms of medieval and early modern theories of jurisprudence. Exploring how and why Shakespeare deviated from his historical source materials, this work focuses on 1 Henry VI's unhistorical scenes and examines details of characterization, dialogue and diction in context of legal and political works that would have been familiar to most educated Elizabethans.