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The Plum in the Golden Vase (also known as The Golden Lotus) was published in the early seventeenth century and may be the first long work of Chinese fiction written by a single (though anonymous) author. Featuring both complex structural elements and psychological and emotional realism, the novel centers on the rich merchant Ximen Qing and his household and describes the physical surroundings and material objects of a Ming dynasty city. In part a social, political, and moral critique, the novel reflects on hierarchical power relations of family and state and the materialism of life at the time.
The essays in this volume provide ideas for teaching the novel using a variety of approaches, from questions of genre, intertextuality, and the novel's reception to material culture, family and social dynamics, and power structures in sexual relations. Insights into the novel's representation of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, legal culture, class, slavery, and obscenity are offered throughout the volume.
Before children's stories came to exemplify the French fairy tale, early modern audiences read the works of women writers known as conteuses. From the late seventeenth century through the Revolution, the conteuses published rich, complex tales that were popular in literary salons and elite courtly settings.
These unpredictable works feature candid representations of female desire, strong support for the education of women, and surprising twists on the fairy tale formulas familiar to readers of Charles Perrault. Not only witty and entertaining, the tales also comment on the unfair treatment of women that the authors saw in society, history, and myth.
Brief biographies introduce to new audiences writers who challenged social conventions, won popular and critical acclaim, and defined the fairy tale genre in their own time.
Shakespeare’s King Lear is as significant in Western literature as the Oresteia, the Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote. Everything about it is unforgettable: Cordelia’s honest answers to her deluded and raging father, Regan and Goneril’s cruelty, Lear on the heath, the blinding of Gloucester, Edgar’s feigned madness, and the meaningful nonsense of the Fool. The subject of intense literary and cultural critical attention, the play exists in different versions and has been adapted and changed countless times. Richard Knowles’s edition, the product of more than twenty years of labor, records every important variant, discusses the critical controversies, provides the work’s sources, and guides readers through four hundred years of stage history and adaptations. A compendium of information and scholarship, this New Variorum Edition is a milestone and will be invaluable to scholars, directors, and actors for decades to come.
Once merely a footnote in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies and rarely taught, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, is now essential reading for scholars and a classroom favorite. It appears in general surveys and in courses on early modern British writers, postcolonial literature, American literature, women’s literature, drama, the slave narrative, and autobiography.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” provides not only resources for the teacher of Oroonoko but also a brief chronology of Behn’s life and work. In part 2, “Approaches,” essays offer a diversity of perspectives appropriate to a text that challenges student assumptions and contains not one story but many: Oroonoko as a romance, as a travel account, as a heroic tragedy, as a window to seventeenth-century representations of race, as a reflection of Tory-Whig conflict in the time of Charles II.
Which John Dryden should be brought into the twenty-first-century college classroom? The rehabilitator of the ancients? The first of the moderns? The ambivalent laureate? The sidelined convert to Rome? The literary theorist? The translator? The playwright? The poet? This volume in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature addresses the tensions, contradictions, and versatility of a writer who, in the words of Samuel Johnson, “found [English poetry] brick, and left it marble,” who was, in the words of Walter Scott, “one of the greatest of our masters.”
Part 1, “Materials,” offers a guide to the teaching editions of Dryden’s work and a discussion of the background resources, from biographies and literary criticism to social, cultural, political, and art histories. In part 2, “Approaches,” essays describe different pedagogical entries into Dryden and his time. These approaches cover subjects as various as genre, adaptation, literary rivalry, musical setting, and political and religious poetry in classroom situations that range from the traditional survey to learning through performance.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—a witty, intellectually formidable, and prolific author—stands as an icon of women’s early writing and of colonial New Spain. Living in the capital city of seventeenth-century Mexico, she was located in the center of her world, but, as a self-taught, illegitimate, Creole woman and as a nun subject to the authority of male religious leaders, she was also socially marginal within that world. Like other early modern women she took up the pen to challenge gendered norms of the time. In style and content her works, which draw on baroque stylistics, classical rhetoric, and the natural sciences, are key documents in the development of Western literature.
Part 1 of this 98th volume in the Approaches to Teaching series evaluates the most useful materials among the wealth of resources available for teaching Sor Juana, reviews Spanish- and English-language editions of her work, highlights audiovisual and electronic resources for teaching, and recommends critical and historical studies of her writings and her period.
The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” aim to help teachers navigate with students not only the complex networks of meaning found in Sor Juana’s works but also her complicated social world. Contributors discuss gender and religion in colonial society; the element of the baroque in Sor Juana’s writing; the variety of ways Sor Juana subverted generic forms to render social criticism; and the relations between her writing and the twenty-first century.
Milton’s shorter poetry and prose can be challenging to teach, but they reward instructors and students many times over: they introduce in compact, accessible form the themes and difficult syntax of Paradise Lost, expand and comment on the epic and on one another, and provide students ideal training in close reading. The essays in this volume constitute a road map for exploring the most frequently taught of Milton’s shorter works—”Lycidas,” the Nativity Ode, Comus, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica, and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce—as well as the sonnets, Paradise Regained, The Reason of Church Government, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, among others. The contributors demonstrate ways of incorporating Milton’s shorter works into a range of classrooms, from survey courses to Milton seminars; list specific tools to make the works’ relevance and aesthetic pleasures available to a wide variety of student populations; and offer a wealth of techniques for helping students navigate Milton’s demanding style and complicated historical context.
Like all volumes in the Approaches series, this collection includes a convenient survey of original and supplementary materials and a comprehensive array of classroom tactics. Three sections of essays provide general approaches to the poetry and prose, through biography, genre, literary and political history, and other methodologies. The fourth section addresses the teaching of individual poems, and the final section articulates ways into specific prose works.
This edition, The Winter’s Tale, not only contains the complete text of the play but also presents the expanse of scholarly opinion and interpretation since the earliest commentary. It covers dating, sources, and emendations to stage history and influential interpretations of particular words.
This Variorum volume includes a CD that contains the contents as fully text-searchable PDFs with internal links for easy navigation.
Inaugurated in the 1860s and the standard reference edition of Shakespeare’s work, the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare continues the tradition of the original Variorum editions of the early nineteenth century. The New Variorum editions are valuable resources for an international audience of scholars, students, directors, actors, and general readers. Overseen by two general editors and an MLA committee, the production of each edition is conducted by a team of scholars and researchers working over a number of years.
The beautiful Marquise de Banneville meets a handsome marquis, and they fall in love. But the young woman is actually a young man (brought up as a girl and completely in the dark about her—or his—true sex), while the marquis is actually a young woman who likes to cross-dress. Will they live happily ever after?
In the introduction, Joan DeJean presents the fascinating puzzle of authorship of this lighthearted gender-bending tale written in the late seventeenth century in France.
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