A Century of English Essays


Book Description




The Book of Twentieth-century Essays


Book Description

This collection of the best essays written in the English language during the past one hundred years includes many that have become landmarks defining their time: Norman Mailer's The White Negro, Tom Wolfe's These Radical Chic Evenings, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, and Gore Vidal's The Holy Family. Others are in a lighter vein, like James Thurber's lampoon of Salvador Dali's Secret Life or Max Beerbohm's reflections on Laughter. There are Philip Roth on baseball and A. P. Herbert on bathrooms; Mary McCarthy's My Confession, on her Communist sympathies; and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-up. Each reader will have his or her own favorites: Eudora Welty capturing the precise moment at which she grew up, or Arthur Koestler debunking the effects of magic mushrooms. And each essay has stood the test of time, like Hannah Arendt's The Concentration Camps, Edmund Wilson's now classic The Wound and the Bow, and Paul Fussell on World War II.




Writing Assessment in the 21st Century


Book Description

For over forty years, Edward M. White, author seminal works in instruction and evaluation, has led debates about accountability by focusing on student learning. In this edited collection, thirty five leaders in assessment pay tribute to Professor White by documenting the landscape, strategies, consequence, and future of the field.







"Cultures of Whiggism"


Book Description

In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope noted that his age was one of Parties, both in Wit and State. Much scholarship has been devoted to the complexities of the political parties of the eighteenth century, but there has been a surprising reluctance to explore what Pope implied were the corollaries of those parties, namely, parties in literature. The essays collected here explore the literary culture that arose from and supported what Pitt the Elder referred to as the great spirit of Whiggism that animated English politics during the eighteenth century. From the prehistory of Whiggism in the court of Charles II to the fractures opened up within it by the French Revolution in the 1790s, the interactions between Whiggish politics and literature are sampled and described in groundbreaking essays that range widely across the fields of eighteenth-century political prose, poetry, and the novel.




Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century


Book Description

The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation among lexicography, the culture of the book, and the canonization and commemoration of English literary figures and their works in the long eighteenth century. The source of inspiration for each piece is Allen Reddick’s scholarship on Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great English lexicographer whose Dictionary (1755) included thousands upon thousands of illustrative quotations from the “best” authors, and, more recently, on Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), the much less well-known bibliophile who sent gifts of books by a pantheon of Whig authors to individuals and libraries in Britain, Protestant bastions in continental Europe, and America. Between the covers of Words, Books, Images readers will encounter canonical English authors of prose and poetry—Bacon, Milton, Defoe, Dryden, Pope, Richardson, Swift, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Edward Lear. But they will also become acquainted with the agents of their canonization and commemoration—the printers and publishers of Grub Street, the biographer John Aubrey, the lexicographer and biographer Johnson, the bibliophile Hollis, and the portrait painter Reynolds. No less crucially, they will meet fellow readers of then and now—women and men who peruse, poach, snip, and savour a book’s every word and image.







The Penguin Book of Twentieth-century Essays


Book Description

Whether highly personal, polemical, philosophical or playful, the essays in this fascinating collection capture their times with wit, urgency, erudition and insight. Decade by decade, the greatest British and American writers span the twentieth century, including Orwell's 'England Your England', Nancy Mitford on the upper classes, Fitzgerald's 'Crack Up', James Baldwin's harrowing 'Notes of a Native Son', Martin Amis on US politics, Tom Wolfe on 'radical chic' and Julian Barnes on the Thatcher years.




Writing America Into the Twenty-first Century


Book Description

Writing America into the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the American Novel seeks to explore an exciting period in American literary scholarship. Concentrating on novels written after 1990 and through to the new millennium and to the present day, this collection presents a refreshing and much-needed analysis of recent American fiction. Representing the work of established scholars and emerging critical voices, the essays interrogate a range of fiction including works by Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy. Accessible to students, scholars and the interested reader, this invigorating collection navigates the works of several key male American authors of the last twenty years and, in so doing, offers a new way of examining the American novel. This volumeâ (TM)s strength lies in its careful academic focus on recent American fiction and seeks to re-acquaint the reader with well-known authors and introduce them to new literary voices such as Christopher John Farley, Anthony Giardina and Daniel Suarez. The collection is organised into four large topic areas: â ~Youth and Age, â (TM) â ~War and Crime, â (TM) â ~Cultureâ (TM) and â ~Spaces and Patterns.â (TM) Each essay deals with its own particular subject and author but the full impact of each section on the concept of writing the American novel into the present day can only really be understood when read in conjunction with the others. Writing America, a companion volume to Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel (2008) would be a valuable asset to any university or branch library. The volume will also attract strong interest from established academics, especially those researching the fields of literature, critical theory, cultural history and politics.




Writing Politics


Book Description

Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology. David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution and war, racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them—and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction.