This anthology of contemporary fiction and poetry by Hispanic American women writers contains material ranging from national award winners to emerging talents. Noting that until recently 20th-century academic literary criticism described ethnic American literature as parochial and politically driven, the anthology's introduction discusses how the…

An innovative and practical resource for teachers looking to move beyond English and American works, this book explores 175 highly teachable short stories from nearly 50 countries, highlighting the work of recognized authors from practically every continent, authors such as Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Isak Dinesen,…

This edition of the guide to Newbery and Caldecott Awards provides an annotated listing of winning children's books since the inception of the awards (1922 and 1938 respectively) through the 1996 selections. The annotations serve as a reliable source for collection development, reader's advisory, curriculum development, and other programs. The…

Studying the life of Langston Hughes in the context of how to teach freshman composition can shed light on two sometimes conflicting pedagogies, the expressivist and the social-constructionist. A discouraging period of fierce criticism, illness, depression, and financial woes coincided with Hughes' 39th birthday, which his biographer Arnold…

This handout is a guide to library resources in the J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, intended to help students find sources of criticism on Modern British Literature (long fiction, short fiction, poetry, and drama). The guide explains important reference sources in the Atkins library reference collection and…

Reflecting educators' ongoing efforts to incorporate the female literary tradition into the canon that is commonly taught in high school and college classrooms, this bibliography derived from the ERIC database presents annotations of 21 journal articles and books concerning women writers and the canon published between 1984 and 1992. Sections of…

Many compositionists correctly charge Romanticism with conveying the iconography of the solitary writer and with embedding that image in modern ideology. There can be little doubt that numerous Romantic texts continue to exalt and signify the concept of the lonely genius and the self-contained text. Romantic masterpieces have contributed to the…

The works of women African writers such as Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Flora Nwapa have become increasingly familiar to North American college students during the past decade, largely through their inclusion on feminist reading lists. Because the pedagogical value of these texts lies in their presumed ability to speak for African…

Walter Dean Myers has gained distinction as an insightful and entertaining writer of imaginative adolescent literature that breaks stereotypes, tells stories of Blacks as people with complex dimension, and redefines the images of African Americans. Myers has written historical works, biography, novels for adolescents, plays, historical fiction,…

Students and teachers need to discuss authorial intent to understand some literary works on their own terms--this is particularly true in the case of Carson McCullers. McCullers' works can be understood as having a rich foundation of authorial intent based on the writer's central experience, as a Southern woman, of gender. The central importance…

Arguing that children are not taken seriously in the United States, this lecture states that basic education is not simply computing and decoding, but also dreaming and imagining. The lecture urges educators not only to stick to the reality of budget cutting and deficit spending but, for the children's sake, also to stick to a dream. In the…

A comparison of the works of two homosexual authors, John Rechy and James Baldwin, reveals similarities--the hating father, an oppressive religion--but also differences in the extent to which the two authors come to terms with themselves. (JH)

Personal experiences with and critical judgments of leading artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century are recorded in Katherine Anne Porter's essays, letters and conversations which provide snapshots of her attitudes and encounters. Porter's commentaries about such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow,…