Against the methodological backdrop of historical and comparative folk narrative research, 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition surveys the history, dissemination, and characteristics of over one hundred narratives transmitted to Western tradition from or by the Middle Eastern Muslim literatures (i.e., authored written works in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish). For a tale to be included, Ulrich Marzolph considered two criteria: that the tale originates from or at least was transmitted by a Middle Eastern source, and that it was recorded from a Western narrator's oral performance in the course of the nineteenth or twentieth century. The rationale behind these restrictive definitions is predicated on Marzolph's main concern with the long-lasting effect that some of the "Oriental" narratives exercised in Western popular tradition-those tales that have withstood the test of time. Marzolph focuses on the originally "Oriental" tales that became part and parcel of modern Western oral tradition. Since antiquity, the "Orient" constitutes the quintessential Other vis-a-vis the European cultures. While delineation against this Other served to define and reassure the Self, the "Orient" also constituted a constant source of fascination, attraction, and inspiration. Through oral retellings, numerous tales from Muslim tradition became an integral part of European oral and written tradition in the form of learned treatises, medieval sermons, late medieval fabliaux, early modern chapbooks, contemporary magazines, and more. In present times, when national narcissisms often acquire the status of strongholds delineating the Us against the Other, it is imperative to distinguish, document, visualize, and discuss the extent to which the West is not only indebted to the Muslim world but also shares common features with Muslim narrative tradition. 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition is an important contribution to this debate and a vital work for scholars, students, and readers of folklore and fairy tales.

Over a period of three years, Henry David Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He scaled peaks, paddled a canoe, and dined on hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes, he acutely observed the rich flora and fauna, as well as the few people he met dotting the landscape, like lumberers, boat-men, and the Abnaki Indians. - The Maine Woods is an American classic, a voyage into nature and the heart of early America.

A handbook -- type overview, covering the general history and each individual book. Features include outlines, themes, interpretation tips, helpful charts, time lines, and diagrams.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs and symbols, a review quiz and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

In the early 1800s, American critics warned about the danger of literature as a distraction from reality. Later critical accounts held that American literature during the antebellum period was idealistic and that literature grew more realistic after the horrors of the Civil War. By focusing on three leading American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson Reading Reality challenges that analysis. Thomas Finan reveals how antebellum authors used words such as ""real"" and ""reality"" as key terms for literary discourse and claimed that the ""real"" was, in fact, central to their literary enterprise. He argues that for many Americans in the early nineteenth century, the ""real"" was often not synonymous with the physical world. It could refer to the spiritual, the sincere, or the individual's experience. He further explains how this awareness revises our understanding of the literary and conceptual strategies of American writers. By unpacking antebellum senses of the ""real,"" Finan casts new light on the formal traits of the period's literature, the pressures of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America, and the surprising possibilities of literary reading.

This book is the final volume of a four-volume set on modern Chinese complex sentences, assessing the key attributes, related sentence structures, and semantic and pragmatic relevance of complex sentences. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. Following on from analysis on coordinate, causal, and adversative types of complex sentences, the ten chapters in this volume review the characteristics of complex sentences as a whole. The author discusses the constituents, related structures, semantic and pragmatic aspects of complex sentences, covering topics such !!as the constraints and counter-constraints between sentence forms and semantic relationships, six type crossover markers, distinctions between simple sentences and complex sentences, clauses formed by a noun/nominal phrase followed by le, the shi structure, subject ellipsis or tacit understanding of clauses, as well as double-subject sentences, alternative question groups and their relationships with complex sentences. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.

This book provides curriculum planners, materials developers, and language educators with curricular perspectives and classroom activities in order to address the needs of learners of English as a global lingua franca in an increasingly globalized and interdependent world. The authors argue that language educators would benefit from synthesizing and using research and evidence-based cooperative learning methods and structures to address the current world-readiness standards for learning languages in the five domains of Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. The book outlines the main cooperative learning principles of heterogenous grouping, positive interdependence, individual accountability, social/collaborative skills, and group processing, then demonstrates their relevance to language teaching and learning. This book will be of interest to students in pre-service teacher education programmes as well as in-service practitioners, teacher trainers and educational administrators.