When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he reportedly greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War." To this day, Uncle Tom's Cabin serves as a touchstone for the war. Yet few works have been selected to represent the Civil War's literature, even though historians have filled libraries with books ......
In this era of shifting geopolitical boundaries, numerous books and articles question what "American" literature is, what "the literary" is, and how what is called early American literature can best be taught. This fifteenth volume of the MLA series Options for Teaching examines these issues and offers approaches and methods to help teachers and ......
Essays on teaching the global climate crisis through cli-fi. Over the past several decades, writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, Kathy Jetil-Kijiner, and Margaret Atwood have explored climate change through literature, reflecting current anxieties about humans' impact on the planet. Emphasizing the importance of ......
In the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Latin American authors found themselves writing for a new audience in both Latin America and Spain and in an ideologically charged climate as the Cold War found another focus in the Cuban Revolution. The writers who emerged in this energized cultural moment-among others, Julio Cortazar ......
The Italian romance epic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its multitude of characters, complex plots, and roots in medieval Carolingian and Arthurian chivalric romances, was a form popular with courtly and urban audiences. In the hands of writers such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, works of remarkable sophistication that combined ......
The study of the history of the English language (HEL) encompasses a broad sweep of time and space, reaching back to the fifth century and around the globe. Further, the language has always varied from place to place and continues to evolve today. Instructors face the challenge of fitting this vast subject into one semester of study and the ......
Graphic novels are now appearing in a great variety of courses: composition, literature, drama, popular culture, travel, art, translation. The thirty-four essays in this volume explore issues that the new art form has posed for teachers at the university level. Among the subjects addressed are *terminology (graphic narrative vs. sequential art, ......
Although globalism may seem like a modern phenomenon, people of the premodern world were also interconnected, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical ......
Essays on teaching medieval Arthurian literature and modern adaptations From the Middle Ages to the present, legends of King Arthur and his court have fascinated readers, inviting contemplation of leadership and community, love and romance, and other perennial concepts. The tales and their history of adaptation affirm that societies across ......
