Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A: Literary Touchstone Classic


Book Description

Describes the early life of Stephen Dedalus: significant memories from infancy, schooldays, family life, his first taste of sin, guilt, repentance-- and his passage to freedom as he elects to leave Ireland forever.




Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man


Book Description

Imagine an author who has become a legend in his own lifetime - all because of the novel he wrote in the first flush of youth. Novelist Eugene Pota is a cultural icon of the twentieth century, struggling to write what will be the last novel of his career. But what to write about when, like so many noted authors before him, all of Pota's output since that first, landmark novel has been scrutinized and dissected - and found wanting? PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, AS AN OLD MAN follows Pota's efforts to settle on a subject for his final work. In his search, Heller - through Pota - pays homage to his favourite authors and discusses the problems that have plagued so many writers whose later works failed to live up to the successes of their first: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, to name but a few. It is a rare and enthralling look into the artist's search for creativity, a search that comes at a point in life when impotence - both sexual and spiritual - has become a frustrating fact. Joseph Heller must have known that this would be his final novel; it stands as a fitting testament to the life and works of a leading light in modern literature.




Dubliners


Book Description

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader understand Joyce's use of textures, dialect, and symbols.Each of the beautifully written short stories in this collection precisely details a brief scene in the life of a resident of Dublin at the turn of the 20th century. Although the characters do not know each other, their experiences unfold along the same streets and often overlap thematically. Their tragedies mirror that of Ireland, a country struggling for political identity and held back, in Joyce's view, by rigid religious ideas and adherence to tradition.Joyce's great skill at dialect offers a sense of the city's complex social structure, while themes of isolation, emotional paralysis, violence, regret, and death run throughout the collection and link all of the stories. Chronologically, too, the stories appear to progress; portrayals of youthful confusion and disillusionment in the opening story, "The Sisters," become the haunting midlife meditations of "The Dead." Like his masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce's Dubliners displays consummate control of nuances, emotions, and images.




Exiles


Book Description




The Secret Life of Bees


Book Description

The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.




Tradition, Literature and Politics in East-Central Europe


Book Description

Milan Kundera warned that in in the states of East-Central Europe, attitudes to the west and the idea of ‘Europe’ were complex and could even be hostile. But few could have imagined how the collapse of communism and membership of the EU would confront these countries with a life that was suddenly and disconcertingly ‘modern’ and which challenged sustaining traditions in literature, culture, politics and established views on identity. Since the countries of East-Central Europe joined the European Union in 2004 the politicians and oppositionists of the centre-left, who once led the charge against communism, have often been forced to give way to right-wing, authoritarian, populist governments. These governments, while keen to accept EU finance, have been determined to present themselves as protecting their traditional ethno-national inheritance, resisting ‘foreign interference’, stemming the ‘gay invasion’, halting ‘Islamic replacement’ and reversing women’s rights. They have blamed Communists, liberals, foreigners, Jews and Gypsies, revised abortion laws, tampered with their constitutions to control the Justice system and taken over the media to an astonishing degree. By 2019, amid calls for the suspension of their voting rights, both Poland and Hungary had been taken to the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament and had begun to explore ways to put conditions on future EU funding. This book focuses on the interface between tradition, literature and politics in east-central Europe, focusing mainly on Poland but also Hungary and the Czech Republic. It explores literary tradition and the role of writers to ask why these left-liberals, who were once ubiquitous in the struggles with communism, are now marginalised, often reviled and almost entirely absent from political debate. It asks, in what ways the advent of capitalism ‘normalised’ literature and what the consequences might be? It asks whether the rise of chauvinism is ‘normal’ in this part of the world and whether the literary traditions that helped sustain independent political thought through the communist years now, instead of supporting literature, feed nationalist opinion and negative attitudes to the idea of ‘Europe’.




An Illustrated Dictionary of Little-known Words from Literary Classics


Book Description

A comprehensive alphabetical reference (abacus to zoot suit) that supplies information on archaic or obscure terms in significant literature from the Bible and Shakespeare's plays to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Handmaid's Tale. Such terms can elucidate character and reveal history, fashion, and custom. Pronunciation, etymology, alternate spellings, and examples of literary uses are included, as well as some 800 small bandw illustrations. With bibliography, references, and author/title and subject indexes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




My Name Is Asher Lev


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic from the National Book Award–nominated author of The Chosen, a young religious artist is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. “A novel of finely articulated tragic power .... Little short of a work of genius.”—The New York Times Book Review Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. He grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. He is torn between two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other devoted only to art and his imagination, and in time, his artistic gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous, visionary portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant.




Modernist Literature


Book Description

This inclusive guide to Modernist literature considers the ‘high’ Modernist writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Yeats alongside women writers and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Challenges the idea that Modernism was conservative and reactionary. Relates the modernist impulse to broader cultural and historical crises and movements. Covers a wide range of authors up to the outbreak of World War II, among them Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Langston Hughes, Samuel Beckett, HD, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys. Includes coverage of women writers and gay and lesbian writers.




The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education


Book Description

The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education integrates, summarizes, and explains, in highly accessible form, foundational knowledge and information about the field of curriculum with brief, simply written overviews for people outside of or new to the field of education. This Guide supports study, research, and instruction, with content that permits quick access to basic information, accompanied by references to more in-depth presentations in other published sources. This Guide lies between the sophistication of a handbook and the brevity of an encyclopedia. It addresses the ties between and controversies over public debate, policy making, university scholarship, and school practice. While tracing complex traditions, trajectories, and evolutions of curriculum scholarship, the Guide illuminates how curriculum ideas, issues, perspectives, and possibilities can be translated into public debate, school practice, policy making, and life of the general public focusing on the aims of education for a better human condition. 55 topical chapters are organized into four parts: Subject Matter as Curriculum, Teachers as Curriculum, Students as Curriculum, and Milieu as Curriculum based upon the conceptualization of curriculum commonplaces by Joseph J. Schwab: subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu. The Guide highlights and explicates how the four commonplaces are interdependent and interconnected in the decision-making processes that involve local and state school boards and government agencies, educational institutions, and curriculum stakeholders at all levels that address the central curriculum questions: What is worthwhile? What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, sharing, contributing, wondering, and imagining? The Guide benefits undergraduate and graduate students, curriculum professors, teachers, teacher educators, parents, educational leaders, policy makers, media writers, public intellectuals, and other educational workers. Key Features: Each chapter inspires readers to understand why the particular topic is a cutting edge curriculum topic; what are the pressing issues and contemporary concerns about the topic; what historical, social, political, economic, geographical, cultural, linguistic, ecological, etc. contexts surrounding the topic area; how the topic, relevant practical and policy ramifications, and contextual embodiment can be understood by theoretical perspectives; and how forms of inquiry and modes of representation or expression in the topic area are crucial to develop understanding for and make impact on practice, policy, context, and theory. Further readings and resources are provided for readers to explore topics in more details.