Results by title

235 books match the query 'Books and reading' and 23 start with c

cover of CONTESTED CASTLE: GOTHIC NOVELS AND THE SUBVERSION OF DOME

CONTESTED CASTLE

GOTHIC NOVELS AND THE SUBVERSION OF DOME

Kate Ferguson Ellis

University of Illinois Press, 1989

The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.
 
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cover of Cart's Top 200 Adult Books for Young Adults: Two Decades in Review

Cart's Top 200 Adult Books for Young Adults

Two Decades in Review

Michael Cart

American Library Association, 2013

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cover of Charles Olson's Reading: A Biography

Charles Olson's Reading

A Biography

Ralph Maud

Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In this narrative account of the life and work of Charles Olson, Ralph Maud focuses on what the poet read as a basis for understanding the work he produced.

To an extraordinary degree, Olson’s reading and life were coextensive, according to Maud, who notes that Olson saw his written output over his lifetime as a total cosmology. An individual who rarely traveled, this major American poet explored the world and its history as well as the furthest reaches of the thought of his day through books.

Maud builds upon George Butterick’s annotated listing of Olson’s library, bought by the University of Connecticut after the poet’s death in 1970. The present volume, however, adds categories of books Butterick deliberately omitted: Olson’s childhood books and poetry by his own contemporaries.

Linking Olson’s books to his intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career, Maud reveals such little-known but important connections as the contracted book project "Operation Red, White and Black" and Olson’s plan for the long poem "West"—two unrealized projects much later shaped into The Maximus Poems.

Maud also outlines the surprisingly multiple role of the painter Corrado Cagli, who brought home to Olson the significance of the Holocaust and introduced him both to the Tarot and to the theories of non-Euclidean geometry that Olson variously incorporated into his poems and essays. In discussing Olson’s relationship to Ezra Pound, Maud defines in some detail what Olson gained from Pound and what he repudiated.

Maud refutes the notion that Olson’s intellectual and creative powers declined during the last years of his life, demonstrating that during these years Olson developed his Jungian interest, his attention to early Greek thought, and a new concern for Northern mythology.

This chronicle of Olson’s reading from childhood to deathbed constitutes a critical biography of the larger-than-life author of Call Me Ishmael and The Maximus Poems. No modern poet is more revealed in his sources than Olson. Maud’s comprehensive and complete study provides a basis for new and fresh modes of thinking about Olson’s great achievement.

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cover of Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms

Child-Sized History

Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms

Sara L. Schwebel

Vanderbilt University Press, 2011

For more than three decades, the same children's historical novels have been taught across the United States. Honored for their literary quality and appreciated for their alignment with social studies curricula, the books have flourished as schools moved from whole-language to phonics and from student-centered learning to standardized testing.

Books like Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry stimulate children's imagination, transporting them into the American past and projecting them into an American future. As works of historical interpretation, however, many are startlingly out of step with current historiography and social sensibilities, especially with regard to race. Unlike textbooks, which are replaced on regular cycles and subjected to public tugs-of-war between the left and right, historical novels have simply--and quietly--endured. Taken individually, many present troubling interpretations of the American past. But embraced collectively, this classroom canon provides a rare pedagogical opportunity: it captures a range of interpretive voices across time and place, a kind of "people's history" far removed from today's state-sanctioned textbooks.

Teachers who employ historical novels in the classroom can help students recognize and interpret historical narrative as the product of research, analytical perspective, and the politics of the time. In doing so, they sensitize students to the ways in which the past is put to moral and ideological uses in the present.

Featuring separate chapters on American Indians, war, and slavery, Child-Sized History tracks the changes in how young readers are taught to conceptualize history and the American nation.

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cover of Children of the Series and How They Grew: or A Century of Heroines & Heroes, Romantic, Comic, Moral

Children of the Series and How They Grew

or A Century of Heroines & Heroes, Romantic, Comic, Moral

Faye Riter Kensinger

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

Children’s series fiction comprises tales incorporating innocence and hard reality along with romance, wit, and character. Heavy streaks of morality diminished as the entertainment element increased. Heroes performed in a wide range of adventures, but restrictions often kept heroines close to home. Series fiction peaked, then waned, but such writers as Beverly Cleary and Madeleine L’Engle carried on the style.
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cover of Children's Literature Gems: Choosing and Using Them in Your Library Career

Children's Literature Gems

Choosing and Using Them in Your Library Career

Elizabeth American Library Association

American Library Association, 2009

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cover of Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism

Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany

The Cultural Policy of National Socialism

Christa Kamenetsky

Ohio University Press, 1984

Between 1933 and 1945, National Socialists enacted a focused effort to propagandize children’s literature by distorting existing German values and traditions with the aim of creating a homogenous “folk community.” A vast censorship committee in Berlin oversaw the publication, revision, and distribution of books and textbooks for young readers, exercising its control over library and bookstore content as well as over new manuscripts, so as to redirect the cultural consumption of the nation’s children. In particular, the Nazis emphasized Nordic myths and legends with a focus on the fighting spirit of the saga heroes, their community loyalty, and a fierce spirit of revenge—elements that were then applied to the concepts of loyalty to and sacrifice for the Führer and the fatherland. They also tolerated select popular series, even though these were meant to be replaced by modern Hitler Youth camping stories.

In this important book, first published in 1984 and now back in print, Christa Kamenetsky demonstrates how Nazis used children’s literature to selectively shape a “Nordic Germanic” worldview that was intended to strengthen the German folk community, the Führer, and the fatherland by imposing a racial perspective on mankind. Their efforts corroded the last remnants of the Weimar Republic’s liberal education, while promoting an enthusiastic following for Hitler.

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cover of Choosing Books for Children: A COMMONSENSE GUIDE

Choosing Books for Children

A COMMONSENSE GUIDE

Betsy Hearne with Deborah Stevenson

University of Illinois Press, 1999

If you have ever stood in the children's section of a bookstore or library wondering how to go about matching a book to the age, abilities, and interests of a particular child, Choosing Children's Books is for you. Renowned children's librarian and children's book review editor Betsy Hearne offers practical guidance on sorting through the bewildering array of picture books, pop-up books, books for beginning readers, young adult titles, classics, poetry, folktales, and factual books. Each chapter includes an annotated list of recommended titles.

A gold mine of commonsense, sound advice, this newly revised and completely updated edition of Betsy Hearne's classic guide is an indispensable tool for choosing books for children of all ages.

Newly available in paperback, this revised and updated third edition of Betsy Hearne's classic guide stands as the lodestar for navigating through the bewildering array of books for young readers. Hearne surveys everything from picture books, pop-up books, classics, and books for beginning readers to young adult titles, poetry, folktales, and factual books, with an annotated list of recommended titles accompanying each chapter. A gold mine of common sense and sound advice, her guide remains an indispensable tool for choosing books for children of all ages.

 
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cover of Circulating Literacy: Writing Instruction in American Periodicals, 1880-1910

Circulating Literacy

Writing Instruction in American Periodicals, 1880-1910

Alicia Brazeau

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

Near the dawn of the twentieth century, more than a million Americans had subscriptions to popular magazines, and many who did not subscribe read the periodicals. Far more men and women were learning advanced literacy through reading these magazines than by attending college. Yet this form of popular literacy has been relatively ignored by scholars, who have focused mainly on academic institutions and formal educational experiences. In Circulating Literacy: Writing Instruction in American Periodicals, 1880–1910, author Alicia Brazeau concentrates on the format, circulation, and function of popular and influential periodicals published between 1880 and 1910, including the farming magazines Michigan Farmer, Ohio Farmer, and Maine Farmer, which catered to rural residents, and two women’s magazines, Harper’s Bazar and the Ladies’ Home Journal, that catered to very different populations of women.

Brazeau establishes how these magazines shared a common strategy in the construction of literacy identities by connecting a specific identity with a particular set of reading and writing practices. She explores how farm journals were preoccupied with the value of literacy as a tool for shaping community; considers how the Journal and the Bazar deployed distinctly different illustrations of literacy values for women; shows how the Journal and editor Edward Bok cast women as consumers and sellers of literacy; and looks at the ways in which Bazar editors urged readers to adopt habits of reading and writing that emphasized communal relationships among women. In Circulating Literacy, Brazeau speaks to, and connects, the important topics of rural studies, gender, professionalization, and literacy sponsorship and identity, arguing for the value of the study of periodicals as literacy education tools.
 
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cover of Close Reading: The Reader

Close Reading

The Reader

Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, eds.

Duke University Press, 2003

An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more.

From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, Close Reading highlights the interplay between critics—the ways they respond to and are influenced by others’ works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on Hamlet, “Lycidas,” “The Rape of the Lock,” Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also how they are reading.

Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’s collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading.

Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler

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cover of Closely and Consciously: Reading and the US Women's Liberation Movement

Closely and Consciously

Reading and the US Women's Liberation Movement

Yung-Hsing Wu

University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

The significant archive of writing that came out of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good. Yung-Hsing Wu examines the importance of reading—personal, professional, vocational, aesthetic, and always political—and how the act itself brought a host of women, each with their own history with the movement, into relation, and into a belief in that relation. The value given to reading can be seen in the ways feminists pursued media representation; in consciousness-raising (CR) groups including shared reading in their meetings; in women opening bookstores, developing newsletters, establishing journals, and starting presses; and in corporate publishers pursuing feminist fiction.

Closely and Consciously crisscrosses distinct print spheres, including newsletters and periodicals produced by feminist cells and consciousness-raising groups, feminist presses seeking to articulate their visions for women’s writing, the emergence of feminist literary criticism in first-time monographs and newly established journals, personal and editorial correspondence, press records, and the publishing histories of bestsellers that testified to the increasingly broad popularity of women’s writing. Uniting all these disparate activists and media outlets, and providing crucial relationality, was reading. With a mix of close readings and archival research, Wu unpacks and interprets this central act of reading and why it matters during a crucial moment of feminist history.

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cover of Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers

Commerce with the Classics

Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers

Anthony Grafton

University of Michigan Press, 1997

The style of reading in Renaissance Europe, as seen in the margins of books and in the texts of Renaissance intellectuals themselves, is deftly charted in this welcome volume from Anthony Grafton. Growing out of the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures that Anthony Grafton gave at the University of Michigan in 1992, this book describes the interaction between books and readers in the Renaissance, as seen in four major case studies.Humanists Alberti, Pico, Budé, and Kepler, all major figures of their time and now major figures in intellectual history, are examined in the light of their distinctive ways of reading. Investigating a period of two centuries, Grafton vividly portrays the ways in which book/scholar interactions--and the established traditions that were reflected in these interactions--were part of and helped shape the subjects' Humanistic philosophy. The book also indicates how these traditions have implications for the modern literary scene.Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers illustrates the immense variety of the humanist readers of the Renaissance. Grafton describes life in the Renaissance library, how the act of reading was shaped by the physical environment, and various styles of reading during the time. A strong sense of what skilled reading was like in the past is built up through anecdotes, philological analysis, and documents from a wide variety of sources, many of them unpublished.This volume will be of special interest to Renaissance and intellectual historians, students of Renaissance literature, and classicists who concern themselves with the afterlife of their texts.Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University.
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cover of Commercializing Childhood: Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918

Commercializing Childhood

Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918

Paul B. Ringel

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Long before activists raised concerns about the dangers of commercials airing during Saturday morning cartoons, America's young people emerged as a group that businesses should target with goods for sale. As print culture grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, enterprising publishers raced to meet the widespread demand for magazines aimed at middle- and upper-class children, especially those whose families had leisure time and cultural aspirations to gentility. Advertisers realized that these children represented a growing market for more than magazines, and the editors chose stories to help model good consumer behavior for this important new demographic.

In this deeply researched and engaging book, Paul B. Ringel combines an analysis of the stories in nineteenth-century American children's magazines with the backstories of their authors, editors, and publishers to explain how this hugely successful industry trained generations of American children to become genteel consumers. Ringel demonstrates how these publications, which were read in hundreds of thousands of homes, played to two conflicting impulses within American families: to shield children from commercial influences by offering earnest and moral entertainment and to help children learn how to prosper in an increasingly market-driven society.
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cover of Confessions of a Book Reviewer: The Best of Carte Blanche

Confessions of a Book Reviewer

The Best of Carte Blanche

Michael Cart

American Library Association, 2018

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cover of Connecting Boys

Connecting Boys

American Library Association, 2003

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cover of Connecting Boys With Books 2

Connecting Boys With Books 2

Michael Sullivan

American Library Association, 2008

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cover of Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Constructing the Little House

Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Ann Romines

University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

With more than thirty-five million copies in print, the Little House series, written in the 1930s and 1940s by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, has been a spectacular commercial success. What is it about this eight-volume serial novel for children that accounts for its enduring power? And what does the popularity of these books tell us about the currents of American culture?

Ann Romines interweaves personal observation with scholarly analysis to address these questions. Writing from a feminist perspective and drawing on resources of gender studies, cultural studies, and new historicist reading, she examines both the content of the novels and the process of their creation. She explores the relationship between mother and daughter working as collaborative authors and calls into question our assumptions about plot, juvenile fiction, and constructions of gender on the nineteenth-century frontier and in the Depression years when the Little House books were written.

This is a book that will appeal both to scholars and to general readers who might welcome an engaging and accessible companion volume to the Little House novels.
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cover of Cool Story Programs for the School-Age Crowd

Cool Story Programs for the School-Age Crowd

Rob Reid

American Library Association, 2004

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cover of Critical Approaches to Young Adult Literature

Critical Approaches to Young Adult Literature

American Library Association, 2009

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cover of Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid

Crossing through Chueca

Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid

Jill Robbins

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

In the past two decades the city of Madrid has been marked by pride, feminism, and globalization—but also by the vestiges of the machismo nurtured during the long years of the Franco dictatorship. Crossing through Chueca examines how lesbian literary culture fares in this mix from the end of the countercultural movement la movida madrileña in 1988 until the gay marriage march in 2005.

Jill Robbins traverses the various literary spaces of the city associated with queer culture, in particular the gay barrio of Chueca, revealing how it is a product of interrelations—a site crisscrossed by a multiplicity of subjects who constitute it as a queer space through the negotiation of their sexual, racial, gender, and class identities. Robbins recognizes Chueca as a political space as well, a refuge from homophobia. She also shows how the spatial and literary practices of Chueca relate to economic issues.

In examining how women’s sexual identities have become visible in and through the Chueca phenomenon, this work is a revealing example of transnational queer studies within the broader Western discussion on gender and sexuality.
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cover of Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America

Cultural Considerations

Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America

Joan Shelley Rubin

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

A highly regarded scholar in the fields of American cultural history and print culture, Joan Shelley Rubin is best known for her writings on the values, assumptions, and anxieties that have shaped American life, as reflected in both "high" culture and the experiences of ordinary people. In this volume, she continues that work by exploring processes of mediation that texts undergo as they pass from producers to audiences, while elucidating as well the shifting, contingent nature of cultural hierarchy.

Focusing on aspects of American literary and musical culture in the decades after World War II, Rubin examines the contests between critics and their readers over the authority to make aesthetic judgments; the effort of academics to extend the university outward by bringing the humanities to a wide public; the politics of setting poetic texts to music; the role of ideology in the practice of commissioning and performing choral works; and the uses of reading in the service of both individualism and community. Specific topics include the 1957 attack by the critic John Ciardi on the poetry of Anne Morrow Lindbergh in the Saturday Review; the radio broadcasts of the classicist Gilbert Highet; Dwight Macdonald's vitriolic depiction of the novelist James Gould Cozzens as a pernicious middlebrow; the composition and reception of Howard Hanson's "Song of Democracy"; the varied career of musician Gunther Schuller; the liberal humanism of America's foremost twentieth-century choral conductor, Robert Shaw; and the place of books in the student and women's movements of the 1960s.

What unites these essays is the author's ongoing concern with cultural boundaries, mediation, and ideology--and the contradictions they frequently entail.
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cover of Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America

Cultures of Letters

Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America

Richard H. Brodhead

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-emancipation black education. He describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for writers like Stowe, Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charles Chesnutt.
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cover of Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book

Cultures of Print

Essays in the History of the Book

David D. Hall

University of Massachusetts Press, 1996

How did people in early America understand the authority of print and how was this authority sustained and contested? These questions are at the heart of this set of pathbreaking essays in the history of the book by one of America's leading practitioners in this interdisciplinary field.

David D. Hall examines the interchange between popular and learned cultures and the practices of reading and writing. His writings deal with change and continuity, exploring the possibility of a reading revolution and arguing for the long duration of a Protestant vernacular tradition. A newly written essay on book culture in the early Chesapeake describes a system of scribal publication. The pieces reflect Hall's belief that the better we understand the production and consumption of books, the closer we come to a social history of culture.
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