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The most comprehensive edition of Antony and Cleopatra ever produced, this volume is a guide to everything of significance known about the tragedy. It is divided into four main parts:
The volume also reproduces seven major source texts: Plutarch’s Life of Marcus Antonius and Comparison of Demetrius with Antonius, Goulart’s Life of Octavius Caesar Augustus, Appian’s Romanes Warres, Pembroke’s Antonius, and Daniel’s Tragedie of Cleopatra and Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius. A bibliography and an index conclude the work.
Replacing the Variorum Edition of 1907, this volume is indispensable for all academic libraries and for students and scholars of Shakespeare.
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.
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.
“All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote,“ remarked Lionel Trilling about the novel that influenced writers ranging from Fielding to Faulkner. Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ Don Quixote brings together resources and strategies for teaching the novel to undergraduates. Although beginning instructors and nonspecialists might be expected to profit most from this collection, even seasoned Cervantistas will discover much of interest to them and their students.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” evaluates texts, translations, reference works, secondary sources, and aids to teaching. In the second part, “Approaches,” fifteen essays reflect on ways to make Don Quixote come alive for students, explain the interpretive underpinnings behind selected strategies for teaching the novel, examine the work’s oral and written language traditions, discuss the protagonist as the archetypal baroque man, and describe successful ways of presenting Don Quixote to nonmajors.
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.
Frequently identified in French literary histories as the first modern novel—that is, the first to focus on its characters’ thoughts and feelings instead of their heroic actions—Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves has provoked discussion and strong opinions since it was published in 1678. Today instructors use this increasingly popular novel not only in French literature courses but also in comparative literature courses, women’s studies courses, and theme-oriented courses; but its unfamiliar historical setting can be daunting to contemporary classes. In the words of the editors, this collection aims to “give colleagues . . . a sense of seventeenth-century France and show how the novel is a product of this milieu, for these are the keys to making the novel comprehensible and indeed enjoyable to students.”
“Milton’s influence on later poets and his debt to earlier ones,” writes the editor of this book, “define him as central to the study of English literature.” Of all Milton’s works, Paradise Lost is his supreme and most influential accomplishment, but the scope of the epic, the difficulties in its form, and the strangeness of its contexts challenge student and teacher alike. The essays collected here will help teachers at all levels make Milton’s poem accessible to today’s students.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions of Paradise Lost and of other works by Milton and surveys anthologies, reference works, background resources, and critical studies. In the second part, “Approaches,” seventeen teachers, most of whom have taught Paradise Lost regularly for years, offer suggestions for presenting the work in the classroom. The first group of essays provides overviews of the epic and ways of introducing it to students. The next section offers specific teaching strategies, which range from approaching Paradise Lost by first reading Milton’s sonnets to dealing with his treatment of Eve and of relations between the sexes. The final group suggests teaching the backgrounds and contexts of the poem, including the contemporary response to Paradise Lost and the epic’s many allusions to classical literature.
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.
The plays of Molière are immensely popular with both teachers and students, perhaps because, as the editors of this collection of essays observe, they are “immediately accessible despite their being firmly rooted in the French seventeenth-century tradition.” Noted Molière scholars suggest ways to present the plays, focusing on Tartuffe—”an easy play to teach, for beginning students and advanced graduate students alike find it engaging”— and also discussing his other dramatic works.
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.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest play, King Lear is likely the one most often taught at the undergraduate level, but many instructors agree that it may also be the most daunting to teach. A survey conducted for this collection of essays found several common difficulties teachers face in presenting the play: the inability of students to empathize with an old man, bewilderment caused by the pessimistic vision of the play and its ending, difficulty in conveying the universality of the play, and confusion over complex imagery. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s King Lear suggests ways that teachers can meet these challenges and make King Lear engaging and accessible.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” surveys the editions of King Lear most used by instructors, lists recommended readings for students and teachers, and discusses audiovisual materials available for classroom use. In the second part, “Approaches,” sixteen teachers share ideas for teaching King Lear in different settings, from freshman survey courses to seminars devoted entirely to the play. The essays present overviews of the play from a variety of critical perspectives as well as describe specific approaches, such as focusing on theme and character, discussing dramatic and philosophical contexts, and analyzing the roles of the written text and of oral and visual performance.
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