Cultural Journeys


Book Description

As multicultural education is becoming integral to the core curriculum, teachers often implement this aspect into their courses through literature. However, standards and criteria to teach and promote active discussion about this literature are sparse. Cultural Journeys introduces pre-service and experienced teachers to the use of literature to promote active discussions that lead students to think about racial diversity. More than just an annotated list of books for children, Pamela S. Gates and Dianne L. Hall Mark provide systematic guidelines that teachers can use throughout their careers to evaluate multicultural literature for students in grades K-8. At the same time, the text leads the reader to a deeper understanding of how to use multicultural literature throughout the entire curriculum and not just during specially designated months or time periods. With the example unit plans and extensive annotated bibliography, this book is a valuable resource that pre-service teachers will utilize when they begin teaching and in-service teachers will reference repeatedly during their planning periods.




Voyages and Visions


Book Description

A much-needed contribution to the expanding interest in the history of travel and travel writing, Voyages and Visions is the first attempt to sketch a cultural history of travel from the sixteenth century to the present day. The essays address the theme of travel as a historical, literary and imaginative process, focusing on significant episodes and encounters in world history. The contributors to this collection include historians of art and of science, anthropologists, literary critics and mainstream cultural historians. Their essays encompass a challenging range of subjects, including the explorations of South America, India and Mexico; mountaineering in the Himalayas; space travel; science fiction; and American post-war travel fiction. Voyages and Visions is truly interdisciplinary, and essential reading for anyone interested in travel writing. With essays by Kasia Boddy, Michael Bravo, Peter Burke, Melissa Calaresu, Jesus Maria Carillo Castillo, Peter Hansen, Edward James, Nigel Leask, Joan-Pau Rubies and Wes Williams.




The Legacy of the Grand Tour


Book Description

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection examine a wide variety of literature—travel, memoir, and fiction—and explore the ways travel and ideas of “culture” have evolved since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. The sites of the Grand Tour remain a powerful cultural draw, and they continue to define ideas of taste and learning for those who visit them.




Our Human Hearts


Book Description

Reflections on the cultural and biomedical understandings of the human heart "Humans from ancient times have interpreted the heart in many ways: as the home of the soul, the seat of love, the place of wisdom and justice, the symbol of our vitality. No other human organ has had as many meanings attached to it." --from the Introduction Our Human Hearts is a nonfiction exploration of the meanings of the human heart as interpreted by two traditions: medical science, which has made possible dramatic cardiac surgery and sophisticated drug treatments, and the much older cultural traditions that view the heart as a repository for wisdom, courage, emotion, and the soul. Carter interlaces medical and linguistic information with the stories of four heart patients, each with different illnesses and different personal approaches to healing. Much has been written about the heart from a medical standpoint, but few experts have explored the human side of the heart by giving a voice to the patients. Our Human Hearts will be appreciated by the medical community, cardiology patients and their families, and anyone interested in the meaning and health of the human heart.




Around the World in 80 Books


Book Description

'Restlessly curious, insightful, and quirky, David Damrosch is the perfect guide to a round-the-world adventure in reading' Stephen Greenblatt A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, told through eighty classic and modern books 'It is always a pleasure to talk about books with David Damrosch, who has read all of them, and he is so eloquent and understanding about them all' Orhan Pamuk Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard's Department of Comparative Literature and founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel prizewinners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways the world bleeds into literature. To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience, and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives. In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes compelling contemporary works as well as perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction as well as haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we're entering. Taken together, these eighty titles offer us fresh perspective on perennial problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat and the patriarchal structures within and against which many of these books' heroines have to struggle, from the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago to that of Margaret Atwood today. Around the World in 80 Books is a global invitation to look beyond ourselves and our surroundings, and to see our world and its literature in new ways.




Exile in Global Literature and Culture


Book Description

"Prompted by centuries of warfare, political oppression, natural disasters, and economic collapses, exile has had an enormous impact not only on individuals who have undergone transplantation from one culture to another, but also on the host societies they have joined and those worlds they have left behind. Written by prominent literary critics, creative authors, and artists, the essays gathered within Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost meditates upon the painful journeys-geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological-brought about due to exilic rupture, loss and dislocation. Yet, exile also fosters potential pleasures and rewards: to extend scholar Martin Tucker's formulation, wherever the exile might land in flight, he bears with him the sweetness of survival, the triumph of transcendence, the luxury of liminality, the invitation to innovate and invent in new lands. Indeed, exile embodies both blessing and curse, homes found and lost. Furthermore, this book adheres to (and test) the premise that exile's deepest and innermost currents are manifested through writing and other artistic forms"--




Travel and Modernist Literature


Book Description

Through close readings of works from Henry James to W. E. B. Du Bois, and from Virginia Woolf to Jean Rhys, this book discusses how fictional travelers negotiate and adapt various tropes of travel (such as quest, expatriation, displacement, and exile) as models for their own journeys. Specifically, Peat considers the ethical dimensions of modernist travel from two distinct vantages. The first focuses on the relationship between the secular and the sacred in modernist travel literature, arguing that the recurrent narrative of secular travel is haunted by a desire for spiritual transcendence. The second posits modernist travel fiction as a potentially positive example of transcultural relations, consciously arguing against the received notion that travel during an imperial era is always by nature itself imperialist. Throughout, particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of modernism and the various global flows traced by modernist literature.




Victorian Honeymoons


Book Description

While Victorian tourism and Victorian sexuality have been the subject of much critical interest, there has been little research on a characteristically nineteenth-century phenomenon relating to both sex and travel: the honeymoon, or wedding journey. Although the term 'honeymoon' was coined in the eighteenth century, the ritual increased in popularity throughout the Victorian period, until by the end of the century it became a familiar accompaniment to the wedding for all but the poorest classes. Using letters and diaries of 61 real-life honeymooning couples, as well as novels from Frankenstein to Middlemarch that feature honeymoon scenarios, Michie explores the cultural meanings of the honeymoon, arguing that, with its emphasis on privacy and displacement, the honeymoon was central to emerging ideals of conjugality and to ideas of the couple as a primary social unit.




Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Newbery Honor Book)


Book Description

A Time Magazine 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time selection!​ A Reader’s Digest Best Children’s Book of All Time​! This stunning fantasy inspired by Chinese folklore is a companion novel to Starry River of the Sky and the New York Times bestselling and National Book Award finalist When the Sea Turned to Silver In the valley of Fruitless mountain, a young girl named Minli lives in a ramshackle hut with her parents. In the evenings, her father regales her with old folktales of the Jade Dragon and the Old Man on the Moon, who knows the answers to all of life's questions. Inspired by these stories, Minli sets off on an extraordinary journey to find the Old Man on the Moon to ask him how she can change her family's fortune. She encounters an assorted cast of characters and magical creatures along the way, including a dragon who accompanies her on her quest for the ultimate answer. Grace Lin, author of the beloved Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat returns with a wondrous story of adventure, faith, and friendship. A fantasy crossed with Chinese folklore, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a timeless story reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz and Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Her beautiful illustrations, printed in full-color, accompany the text throughout. Once again, she has created a charming, engaging book for young readers.




Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults


Book Description

Beyond the conservative backlash against multiculturalism, Cai (literacy education, U. of Northern Iowa) focuses on definitional issues in multicultural literature, the author's cultural identity and role in such literature, and empowerment in the classroom via reading multiculturally. He presents three views on defining this literature; compares novels by Yep (1993) and Oakes (1949) on the Chinese experience in building the US transcontinental railroad; critiques Norton's (2000) information-driven approach to studying cultural differences and conflicts depicted in literature; and in presenting reader response theory, addresses whether concern with the author's identity is legitimate or merely politically correct. Relevant websites are listed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.