Numerous critics have marked Alejandro Morales's controversial career by its shift from the experimental novel to historical fiction as well as by what Morales himself describes as the connection between intrahistory and intertextuality. Morales's latest work, "The Captain of All These Men of Death," emphasizes the fictive nature of historical…

The American cultural and political landscape has seen changes on the level of seismic shifts in the past four decades, thanks in part to the two very diverse fields of big business and biotechnology. Linking the two arenas together in the literary landscape is a growing body of young adult science fiction that envisions a future shaped profoundly…

Girls today have never known a time of athletic inequality. That is why it is so important to build a strong collection for this particular patron base so the voices of the past can encourage the goals of present and future athletes. The young girls of today have grown up with a wide range of athletic opportunities and most do not know of the…

Modern critics do not consider science fiction and mystery novels to be "serious reading", but Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis questioned the boundaries between "popular" and "serious" literature. Both Christian writers critically discuss the spiritual crisis of the modern world in each fiction genre. This paper…

As the texts readers encounter in and out of school grow in complexity, the strategies that teachers demonstrate and encourage students to employ need to expand to accommodate the changing nature of these texts. In this article, the authors present a three-part framework for utilizing historical fiction picturebooks as instructional resources.…

As an area of research that continues to develop, the study of linguistics worldwide presents the opportunity for the improvement of cross-cultural communication through education and research. Language educators are charged with the task of instructing students to effectively communicate across cultures in a multi-lingual world. The…

Not only is science fiction alive and well--it's flourishing. From the big screen (howdy, Wall-E) to the big books (like Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, which has attracted loads of prepublication praise), 2008 has been a great year for sci-fi. Publishers have released truckloads of new sci-fi titles this year, but what's particularly…

Sharon Creech's "Walk Two Moons" is a defining example of contemporary realistic fiction for children. This article argues that "Walk Two Moons" models storytelling as a tool which children need to understand their own relationship to reality and to literature. Rather than employing a grim verisimilitude, as some critics have charged, Creech has…

Edgar Allen Poe, Langston Hughes, Louisa May Alcott, and Stephen King are just a handful of famous authors who began their publishing careers in their teens. Many young adults would like to write and publish but few know where to begin. While there are many books on how to write and how to get published, none are written specifically for teens.…

While historical fiction by Jean Fritz as well as titles like Robert Lawson's "Ben and Me" (1939) or "Mr. Revere and I" (1954) and Esther Forbes's "Johnny Tremain" (1943) are widely known classics that bring this period to life, recent years have yielded a wealth of new offerings--many of which are accessible picture books or read-alouds. These…

The classroom-based research discussed in this article focuses on how elementary students' experiences with a collection of postmodern picturebooks developed their narrative competence. This article explores how 39 Grades 3 and 4 students' written and visual texts were affected by reading a particular selection of picturebooks. The students wrote…

Two different perspectives on the immigrant struggles are found in a documentary about the radio and television program "The Goldbergs" and a science fiction thriller about the treatment of an immigrant alien community. "Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg" is optimistic and celebrates the achievements of an established ethnic community in America and the woman…

The advantages of introducing detailed scrutiny of metaphor into the college composition, creative writing, and literature curriculum are multiple. A number of researchers think an understanding of metaphor is important for cognitive development. This article establishes reasons for teaching metaphorical thinking and then goes on to argue that…

In this paper the four authors explore the experience of school bullying, drawing on stories of bullying generated in a collective biography workshop and on fictional accounts of bullying. They counter the current trend of reading bullying as individual or family pathology with a post-structuralist analysis of subjectification and power.

This is a collaborative writing project that is ideally suited for introducing longer narrative writing to second-year students. It involves collaborative learning, group dynamics and extended narrative writing. In the "Rockgruppe-Semesterprojekt", groups of students form fictional rock bands, develop tour itineraries through the German-speaking…