Languages

How can the small, isolated island of Bermuda help us to understand the early expansion of English America? First discovered by Europeans in 1505, the island of Bermuda had no indigenous population and no permanent European presence until the early seventeenth century. Settled five years after Virginia and eight years before Plymouth, Bermuda is a foundational site of English colonization. Its history reveals strikingly different paths of potential...

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 features 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.

Recounting the murder of an elderly woman by a student expelled from university, Crime and Punishment is a psychological and political novel that portrays the strains on Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist, Raskolnikov, moves in a world of dire poverty, disillusionment, radicalism, and nihilism interwoven with religious faith and utopianism. In Dostoevsky's innovative style, which he...

Why did so many early modern scientific authors dislike and distrust the printing press? While there is no denying the importance of the printing press to the scientific and medical advances of the early modern era, a closer look at authorial attitudes toward this technology refutes simplistic interpretations of how print was viewed at the time. Rather than embracing the press, scientific authors often disliked and distrusted it. In many cases, they sought to avoid putting...

In Kandé's epic poem, African history collides with the contemporary reality of migration Sylvie Kandé's neo-epic in three cantos is a double narrative combining today's tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé's language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the...

An insightful exploration of the impact of urban change on Black culture, identity, and language Across the United States, cities are changing. Gentrification is transforming urban landscapes, often pushing local Black populations to the margins. As a result, communities with rich histories and strong identities grapple with essential questions. What does it mean to be from a place in flux? What does it mean to be a specific kind of person from that...

The author of Comentarios reales and El Florida del Inca, now recognized as key foundational works of Latin American literature and historiography, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cuzco, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, and later moved to Spain. Recalling the family stories and myths he heard from his Quechua-speaking relatives during his youth and gathering information from friends who...

Survival strategies for communicating in a notification-saturated world As our ability to pay attention in a world of distractions vanishes, it's no wonder that our ability to be heard and understood — to convey our messages — is also threatened. Whether working with our teams and customers or communicating with our families and friends, it is increasingly difficult to break through the digital devices that get in the way of...

This book is a comprehensive guide to administering writing programs at a moment when communication, and thus the teaching of writing, is always changing. A companion to Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century, which considers how writing instructors can successfully adapt to new challenges, this volume addresses the concerns of both novice and experienced writing program administrators. It includes guidance on building and...

Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century is a comprehensive introduction to writing instruction in an increasingly digital world. It provides both a theoretical background and detailed practical guidance to writing instructors faced with novel and ever-changing digital learning technologies, new approaches to access needs and usability design, increasing student diversity, and the multiliteracies of reading, alphabetic writing, and multimodal...

Taking up the idea that teaching is a political act, this collection of essays reflects on recent trends in ecocriticism and the implications for pedagogy. Focusing on a diverse set of literature and media, the book also provides background on historical and theoretical issues that animate the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. The scope is broad, encompassing not only the Global South but also parts of the Global North that have...

No longer relegated to reporting on society happenings or household hints, women columnists have over the past twenty years surged across the boundary separating the "women's" or "lifestyle" sections and into the formerly male bastions of the editorial, financial, medical, and "op-ed" pages. Where men previously controlled the nation's new organizations, were the chief opinion givers, and defined what is newsworthy, many women newspaper columnists are now nationally syndicated...

In the decades since his 1992 breakout novel, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy has gained a reputation as one of the greatest contemporary American authors. Experimenting with genres such as the crime thriller, the post-apocalyptic novel, and the western, his work also engages with the aesthetics of cinema, and several of his novels have been adapted for the screen. While timely and relevant, his works use idiosyncratic language and contain...

Structurally innovative and culturally expansive, the works of Karen Tei Yamashita invite readers to rethink conventional paradigms of genres and national traditions. Her novels, plays, and other texts refashion forms like the immigrant tale, the postmodern novel, magical realism, apocalyptic literature, and the picaresque and suggest new transnational, hemispheric, and global frameworks for interpreting Asian American literature. Addressing...

A stingy man "won't drink branch water till there's a flood," and it is "a mighty triflin' sort o' man'd let either his dog or his woman starve." Some places are "so crowded you couldn't cuss a cat without gettin' fur in your mouth." For almost thirty years Horace Kephart collected sayings like these from his neighbors and friends in the area around Bryson City, North Carolina. Kephart, a...

With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe's languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions,...

The first comprehensive history of American public school librarianship. "Can I get a library pass?" Over the past 120 years, millions of American K–12 public school students have asked that question. Still, we know little about the history of public school libraries, which over the decades were pulled together and managed by hundreds of thousands of school librarians. In American Public School Librarianship, Wayne A. Wiegand recounts the unseen history of both school libraries...

How did an ordinary, if intelligent, boy who wrote unremarkable poems become—with no help, and in record time—the author of one of the most significant and beloved poems of the twentieth century? T. S. Eliot's juvenilia show little inclination to question the social, cultural, religious, or domestic values he had inherited. How did a young man who wrote uninspired doggerel about wilting flowers transform himself—in a mere twenty months—into...

Wolves on a wilderness island illuminate lessons on the environment, extinction, and life. For more than a quarter century, celebrated biologist John Vucetich has studied the wolves, and the moose that sustain them, of the boreal forest of Isle Royale National Park, an island in the northwest corner of Lake Superior. During this time, he has witnessed both the near extinction of the local wolf population, driven largely by climate change, and the...

A groundbreaking collection by leading scholars that spans a broad range of social situations, cultural contexts, and analytic perspectives The contemporary landscape of discourse analysis — which examines spoken, written, and multimodal...