Written for readers who have a passion for Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Wordcraft takes a comprehensive look at Shakespeare's stellar use of language devices throughout his plays, devices he used to ink memorable lines like these: * I must be cruel only to be kind * Fair is foul, and foul is fair * Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! * Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! In a clear, accessible, non-academic style - using plain terms, modern quotes, and several thousand examples - Shakespeare's Wordcraft deftly reveals how these lasting lines were not accidental or coincidental, but designed and crafted by a master of the word.

For several generations, comics were regarded as a boy's club-created by, for, and about men and boys. In the twenty-first century, however, comics have seen a rise of female creators, characters, and readers. While this sudden presence of women and girls in comics is being regarded as new and noteworthy, the observation is not true for the genre's entire history. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the medium was enjoyed equally by both sexes, and girls were the protagonists of some of the earliest, most successful, and most influential comics. In Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics, Michelle Ann Abate examines the important but long-overlooked cadre of young female protagonists in US comics during the first half of the twentieth century. She treats characters ranging from Little Orphan Annie and Nancy to Little Lulu, Little Audrey of the Harvey Girls, and Li'l Tomboy-a group that collectively forms a tradition of funny girls in American comics. Abate demonstrates the massive popularity these funny girls enjoyed, revealing their unexplored narrative richness, aesthetic complexity, and critical possibility. Much of the humor in these comics arose from questioning gender roles, challenging social manners, and defying the status quo. Further, they embodied powerful points of collection about both the construction and intersection of race, class, gender, and age, as well as popular perceptions about children, representations of girlhood, and changing attitudes regarding youth. Finally, but just as importantly, these strips shed light on another major phenomenon within comics: branding, licensing, and merchandising. Collectively, these comics did far more than provide amusement-they were serious agents for cultural commentary and sociopolitical change.

The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner's life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner's life has yet to come to terms with the life-long friendships he maintained with gay men, the Extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his "apocryphal" creation of Yoknapatawpha County. Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond explores the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and places his fiction into established canons of LGBTQ literature, including World War I literature and representations of homosexuality from the Cold War. The book offers a full consideration of his relationship to gay history and identity in the twentieth century, giving rise to a new understanding of this most important of American authors.

This book reinterprets the relevance, quality and impact of academic literacies provision at university in light of recent higher education developments in a pandemic-transformed world. Drawing on the author's own experience of researching, implementing and assessing academic literacies provision, and on insights from broader scholarship and professional debates, the book helps set a new direction of travel for academic literacies professionals working in a variety of roles to enable and resource students' academic and professional growth. It makes recommendations for policy, strategy and scholarship-informed practice that place value on communicating with confidence, clarity and care at university and beyond.

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes (Placido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic Language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Placido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Placido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Placido's antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway's emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Placido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.

Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell maintained lifelong, wellA -documented friendships with one another, often discussing each other's work in private correspondence and published reviews. Joan Romano Shifflett's Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry traces the artistic and personal connections between the three writers. Her study uncovers the significance of their parallel literary development and reevaluates dominant views of how American poetry evolved during the midA -twentieth century. Familiar accounts of literary history, most prominently the celebration of Lowell's Life Studies as a revolutionary breakthrough into confessional poetry, have obscured the significance of the deep connections that Lowell shared with Warren and Jarrell. They all became quite close in the 1930s, with the content and style of their early poetry revealing the impact of their mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose aesthetics the three would ultimately modify and transform. The three poets achieved professional maturity and success in the 1940s, during which time they relied on one another's honest critiques as they experimented with changes in subject matter and modes of expression. Shifflett shows that their works of the late 1940s were heavily influenced by Robert Frost. This period found Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell infusing ostensibly simple verse with multifaceted layers of meaning, capturing the language of speech in diction and rhythm, and striving to raise human experience to a universal level. During the 1950s, the three poets became public figures, producing major works that addressed the nation's postwar need to reconnect with humanity. Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell continued to respond in interlocking ways throughout the 1960s, with each writer using innovative stylistic techniques to create a colloquy with readers that directed attention away from superficial matters and toward the important work of selfA -reflection. Drawing from biographical materials and correspondence, along with detailed readings of many poems, Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell offers a compelling new perspective on the shaping of twentieth-A century American poetry.

James Salter (1925-2015) has been known throughout his career as a writer's writer, acclaimed by such literary greats as Susan Sontag, Richard Ford, John Banville, and Peter Matthiessen for his lyrical prose, his insightful and daring explorations of sex, and his examinations of the inner lives of women and men. Conversations with James Salter collects interviews published from 1972 to 2014 with the award-winning author of The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and All That Is. Gathered here are his earliest interviews following acclaimed but moderately selling novels, conversations covering his work as a screenwriter and award-winning director, and interviews charting his explosive popularity after publishing All That Is, his first novel after a gap of thirty-four years. These conversations chart Salter's progression as a writer, his love affair with France, his military past as a fighter pilot, and his lyrical explorations of gender relations. The collection contains interviews from Sweden, France, and Argentina appearing for the first time in English. Included as well are published conversations from the United States, Canada, and Australia, some of which are significantly extended versions, giving this collection an international scope of Salter's wide-ranging career and his place in world literature.

This critical reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide:
*a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century
*insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century
*closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated.
Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of "Debating Twentieth-Century Literature" or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century.
Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," Mansfield's "Short Stories," poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's "Sunset Song," Eliot's "Prufrock," Brecht's "Galileo," Woolf's "Orlando," Okigbo's "Selected Poems," du Maurier's "Rebecca," poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," Puig's "Kiss" "of the Spiderwoman," Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," Heaney's "New Selected Poems 1966-1987," Gurnah's "Paradise" and Barker's "The Ghost Road."

This critical reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide:
*a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century
*insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century
*closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated.
Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of "Debating Twentieth-Century Literature" or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century.
Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," Mansfield's "Short Stories," poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's "Sunset Song," Eliot's "Prufrock," Brecht's "Galileo," Woolf's "Orlando," Okigbo's "Selected Poems," du Maurier's "Rebecca," poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," Puig's "Kiss" "of the Spiderwoman," Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," Heaney's "New Selected Poems 1966-1987," Gurnah's "Paradise" and Barker's "The Ghost Road."

The Short Story of the Novel is a new and innovative introduction to the best works of fiction from the last 500 years. Simply constructed, the book explores 60 key novels from The Tale of Genji to My Brilliant Friend. In addition to enjoyable descriptions of the novels and concise explanations of why they are important, the book illuminates the most significant writing genres, themes and techniques. Accessible and fun to read, with a foreword by Professor Peter Boxall, this pocket guide will give readers a new way to enjoy their favourite books - and to discover new ones.

During World War I, as young men journeyed overseas to battle, American women maintained the home front by knitting, fundraising, and conserving supplies. These became daily chores for young girls, but many longed to be part of a larger, more glorious war effort. A new genre of children's books entered the market, written specifically with the young girls of the war period in mind. Through fiction, girls could catch spies, cross battlefields, man machine guns, and blow up bridges. These adventurous heroines built the framework for the feminist revolution, creating avenues of leadership for women and inspiring individualism and self-discovery. The work presented here analyzes the powerful response to such literature, how it sparked the engagement of real girls in the United States and Allied war effort, as well as how it reflects their contemporaries' awareness of girls' importance.

First Contact is just that, a place for teen or adult readers, to make a first foray into the world of science fiction and fantasy. There are classics in each category, as well as current titles popular with both younger and older teens. The designations M J S stand for either middle school, grades 6-8, junior high school, grades 7-8, or senior high school, grades 10-12. Rather than a comprehensive selection tool, this volume is a beginning reader's advisory book, a key to unlock the delicious array of imaginative writings that one finds in these challenging genres.

The word is all over Austen's novels: what ought to be done, what one ought to say, how one ought to feel (versus how one does feel). When Austen's characters employ an ought, the delicate oscillation between first- and third-person perspectives that marks her prose leads the reader to distinguish between what they say, and what they ought, according to a morally idealized, third-person calculus, to mean. But what is the context of this ought? This book situates the disinterested, reflective appeal to moral principle invoked_ironically or otherwise_in Austen's oughts within the history of thought about judgment in the British eighteenth century. Beginning with Shaftesbury's critique of Locke's account of judgment, successive readings explore the emphasis on disinterest in works by David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Richardson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds alongside discussions of Jane Austen's major novels.

Providing an overview of the dynamic field of comics and graphic novels for students and researchers, this Essential Guide contextualises the major research trends, debates and ideas that have emerged in Comics Studies over the past decades. Interdisciplinary and international in its scope, the critical approaches on offer spread across a wide range of strands, from the formal and the ideological to the historical, literary and cultural. Its concise chapters provide accessible introductions to comics methodologies, comics histories and cultures across the world, high-profile creators and titles, insights from audience and fan studies, and important themes and genres, such as autobiography and superheroes. It also surveys the alternative and small press alongside general reference works and textbooks on comics. Each chapter is complemented by list of key reference works.

This book is a user-friendly guide to English literature from 1960 to the present. Written by the authors of The Routledge History of Literature in English (now in its second edition), The Routledge Guide to Modern English Writing considers the development and status of English writing today. From Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes to Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett, the book is essential reading for all readers of contemporary writing.

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists. Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.

Bringing together 70 major critical articles across four volumes, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources collects scholarly articles, reviews and critical interventions that are indispensable to anyone wishing to gain an understanding of world drama from the past 150 years. Contesting a Eurocentric reading or history of modern drama, the articles underscore the importance of migration and transnational movements of dramatic forms, and place emphasis on the transmission and circulation of dramatic theories around the world. Modern drama is revealed as a worldwide phenomenon in which a diverse array of artists and writers participated and in which modernism is seen to have affected all parts of the world in ways that are much more complex and multi-directional than what has been assumed in Eurocentric models. The four volumes are arranged both thematically and chronologically to give readers a sense of how world modern and contemporary drama began and how it has been studied in the past 150 years. Volume 1: Beginnings This volume includes essays that describe various beginnings of modern drama. Instead of identifying a singular origin of modern drama with a linear chronology, the volume suggests multidirectional and multidimensional beginnings. The geographical area covered in the volume is extensive, and each essay describes different ways to conceptualize time, chronology, and what would be considered innovative in dramatic writing. Volume 2: Theories This volume includes essays that address theoretical questions of modern and contemporary world drama. In many ways, modern drama around the world began as a theoretical endeavor that questioned the fundamentals of the dramatic form. Like the first volume, the second illustrates an array of studies that challenge a singular interpretation of modern and contemporary drama. Many of the essays provide practical applications of dramatic theories, and all of them situate the core analysis in historically and politically specific contexts, and the volume questions what theory means to lived experiences in the era of globalization. Volume 3: Movements This volume includes themes of migration, exchange, national borders, exile, and diaspora, and the theatrical stage is often used as a laboratory to examine key issues of globalization and displacement. The volume also examines other definitions of "movements," including political and aesthetic movements that have determined the development of modern and contemporary drama. Like the first two volumes, the third volume prioritizes studies that emphasize the complexities of the global and cosmopolitan experience and refuses to arrive at a narrative with a singular or universal perspective. Volume 4: Twenty-First Century This volume continues many topics raised in the first three volumes and considers how the new millennium has affected the development of modern and contemporary world drama. The essays in the volume examine various developments that are commonly described with the prefix "post," as in posthumanism, post-truth, postcolonial, postrace, and post-nation. A number of the essays concern uncertainties around the future of humanity in the age of technological advancements and late capitalism.

In Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies, authors Shelley Ingram, Willow G. Mullins, and Todd Richardson talk about things folklorists don't usually talk about. They ponder the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever they talk about folklore and how those expectations necessarily affect the folklore they are talking about. The book's chapters are wide-ranging in subject and style, yet they all orbit the idea that much of folklore, both as a phenomenon and as a field, hinges upon unspoken or absent assumptions about who people are and what people do. The authors articulate theories and methodologies for making sense of these unexpressed absences, and, in the process, they offer critical new insights into discussions of race, authenticity, community, literature, popular culture, and scholarly authority. Taken as a whole, the book represents a new and challenging way of looking again at the ways groups come together to make meaning. In addition to the main chapters, the book also includes eight "interstitials," shorter studies that consider underappreciated aspects of folklore. These discussions, which range from a consideration of knitting in public to the ways that invisibility shapes an internet meme, are presented as questions rather than answers, encouraging readers to think about what more folklore and folklore studies might discover if only practitioners chose to look at their subjects from angles more cognizant of these unspoken gaps.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:
* the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period
* the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes; and
* the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.
The sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.
If you are beginning to study Othello, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

This revised Norton Critical Edition is based on the first edition text (dated 1818, but likely issued in late 1817). The editor has spelled out ampersands and made superscript letters lowercased. The novel, which is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations, is followed by the two canceled chapters that comprise Persuasion's original ending. "Backgrounds and Contexts" collects contemporary assessments of Jane Austen as well as materials relating to the social issues of the day. Included are an excerpt from William Hayley's 1785 "Essay on Old Maids"; Austen's letters to Fanny Knight, which reveal her skepticism about marriage as the key to happiness; Henry Austen's memorial tribute to his famous sister; assessments by nineteenth-century critics Julia Kavanagh and Goldwin Smith, who viewed Austen as an unassuming, sheltered, and "feminine" rural writer; and the perspective of Austen's biographer, Geraldine Edith Mitten. The Second Edition emphasizes current critical scholarship, reflecting enormous shifts in our comprehension of Austen's achievement and opening the door to new ways of thinking about Persuasion and its author. For the first time, we can think complexly about Austen living through the Napoleonic Wars on the Continent and experiencing their political repercussions at home-the same as everyone else in England at that time. Four new essays-by Linda Bree, Sidney Gottlieb, John Wiltshire, and David Monaghan-speak to these new perspectives; those by Gottlieb and Monaghan expand the conversation into film adaptations of the novel. A Chronology of Austen's life and work, new to the Second Edition, is included along with an updated Selected Bibliography.

Published in 1979: This is a play based on the reign of King John with notes.

Frank Yerby's first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, established him as a writer and launched a forty-nine-year career in which he published thirty-three novels. He also became the first African American writer to sell more than a million copies of his work and to have a book adapted into a movie by a Hollywood studio. He garnered legions of loyal fans of his writing. Yet, few know that Yerby began his writing career with the publication of a short story in his school newspaper in 1936, the first of nine stories he would publish in the 1930s and '40s. Most stories appeared in small journals and magazines and were largely forgotten once he started writing novels.This groundbreaking collection gives readers access to an intriguingly diverse selection of Yerby's short fiction. The stories collected here, eleven of which have never previously been published, paint a picture of Yerby as an intellectual who thought deeply about several philosophical questions at the center of understanding what it means to be human. The stories also reveal him as an artist committed to exploring a range of human drives, longings, conflicts, and passions, from the quirky to the serious, and in a variety of writing styles. With an attention to historical detail, voice, and character that he became known for, these stories give us new insights into this important African American writer who dared to believe he could earn a living as a writer.

In the sixth volume of his Selected Works, I. A. Richards focuses on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.