English Resources

Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison's career.

From Frederick Douglass to the present, the preoccupation of black writers with manhood and masculinity is a constant.Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson explores how in their own work three major African American writers contest classic portrayals of black men in earlier literature, from slave narratives through the great novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Keith Clark examines short stories, novels, and plays by Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, arguing that since the 1950s the three have interrupted and radically dismantled the constricting literary depictions of black men who equate selfhood with victimization, isolation, and patriarchy. Instead, they have re-imagined black men whose identity is grounded in community, camaraderie, and intimacy.

With a new and more inclusive perspective for the growing field of queer Native studies, Lisa Tatonetti provides a genealogy of queer Native writing after Stonewall. Looking across a broad range of literature, Tatonetti offers the first overview and guide to queer Native literature from its rise in the 1970s to the present day. In The Queerness of Native American Literature, Tatonetti recovers ties between two simultaneous renaissances of the late twentieth century: queer literature and Native American literature. She foregrounds how Indigeneity intervenes within and against dominant interpretations of queer genders and sexualities, recovering unfamiliar texts from the 1970s while presenting fresh, cogent readings of well-known works.

This unique collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare for the powerful potential of emotions to shape and critique complex notions of temporality and textuality. The contributors show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy uselove and the other emotions love both spawns and absorbs as a means of approaching the past and the problem of tradition.

This book suggests that James Joyce, like Yeats and his fellow Revivalists, was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom. It shows how his acute historical sensibility is reflected in Dubliners, posing new questions about one of the most enduring collections of short stories ever written. The answers provided are a fusion of history and literary criticism, using close readings that balance techniques of realism and symbolism.

Amid saints and sinners, open secrets and queer codes, the mechanisms of confession and the infliction of torture, what is unspeakable in the Middle Ages - and who decides? Aspiring to the ineffable glories of heaven or plunging down to the murky depths of "unmentionable sin", this very functional concept becomes attached to the very good and the very bad in medieval literature and culture. This book investigates the concept and use of the trope of unspeakability from pre-Conquest to late medieval literature in England, and the relationship between that which cannot be said and cultural and social understandings of gender and sexuality.

Award winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders once compared the art of essay writing to "the pursuit of mental rabbits"--a rambling through thickets of thought in search of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth. While some people persist in the belief that essays are stuffy and antiquated, the truth is that the personal essay is an ever-changing creative medium that provides an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge to document truths as we experience them and share them with others--to capture a bit of life on paper. Crafting the Personal Essay is designed to help you explore the flexibility and power of the personal essay in your own writing.

The only style manual ever to appear on the best-seller lists offers practical, fundamental advice on improving writing skills, promoting a style marked by simplicity, orderliness, and sincerity.

Scenario: The Craft of Screenwriting presents a system of logical analysis of the basic structures of successful screenplays, from initial plot-lines to realised scripts. All the essential building blocks are discussed in depth: the need for a strong premise, the roles of protagonist and antagonist, the orchestration of plot, characters and dialogue leading to a clear resolution. Written by a highly-experienced and successful screenwriter, this is a book which not only instructs first-time writers how to go about their work but also serves as a valuable check-list for established authors, and for actors, directors and teachers, in their task of deconstructing and assessing the value of the material placed before them.