World and Time

All titles

Edition:

1st Edition

Author:

Adrian Barlow

Published:

January 2009

Availability:

Available

Format:

ISBN:

9780521712477

Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres.

£8.95

GBP

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Overview

Providing an invaluable resource for any teacher of English: it both presents a fascinating overview of teaching Literature today, and offers a valuable and practical guide to anyone teaching advanced courses in the subject. The book asks whether it is possible to combine the recent focus on the contextual study of literary texts with a continuing emphasis on close reading and discusses the key literary skills that universities expect students of literature to have developed. The book demonstrates surprising ways in which the study of context can give a new and sharper focus to the words on the page.

Features

Each title includes a wide-ranging yet carefully levelled introductory discussion of a literary period, genre or theme, to provide students with an excellent introduction to an area of literature.
Helps students to address the new assessment objective 4 ('demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received') - worth up to 35% of the A level qualification under new guidelines.
Discussion questions and end-of-section tasks offer an invaluable resource for self study as well as helpful exam preparation.
A mini-anthology of texts and extracts saves teachers time searching for appropriate 'wider reading' texts.

Contents
Preface
TEACHING LITERATURE IN CONTEXT AND CONTEXT IN LITERATURE: Introduction - what are we doing here?
Assessing literature in context
The case for close reading
'Context' in context
CLOSE READING AND CONTEXT - WORDSWORTH's SONNET 'UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE'
QUESTIONS OF CONTEXT: POETRY IN CONTEXT: Shelley and Smith - 'Ozymandias' whose 'Ozymandias'?
Coleridge's Great Escape - 'This Lime Tree Bower My Prison'
Misleading contexts - TS Eliot and 'Usk'
Form as context - when is a sonnet not a sonnet?
SHAKESPEAREAN CONTEXTS: Teaching Shakespeare - 1908 seen from 2008
Venetian contexts - Othello and The Merchant of Venice
Tongue-tied? The silent speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets
On the watch in Shakespeare - Twelfth Night, Henry V, Richard II
CONTEXTS AND THE NOVEL: Too tall? 'Handsome' in Jane Austen (Emma, Persuasion)
Ways of seeing - teaching new texts (Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate
Joe Treasure, The Male Gaze)
Englishness in the contemporary novel (Julian Barnes, England, England
David Lodge, Nice Work
Zadie Smith, White Teeth)
Film and image as context (Ian McEwan, Atonement
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)
NON-FICTION PROSE IN CONTEXT: Essays and blogs (Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Mary Beard)
Travel writing - In search of England? (Rupert Brooke, Letters from America)
CONFLICT AND CALAMITY AS CONTEXTS IN LITERATURE: The Literature of War ('The stage was set': concert parties and the theatre of war
'The Lords of No Man's Land': memorialising the Great War)
From the Tsunami to Saddam Hussein (Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters
Charles Lamb, Richard Aldington, Primo Levi)
MOVING ON: FROM 'ENGLISH LITERATURE' TO 'ENGLISH STUDIES': Context in transition - what universities want
Poetry and translation - more questions of context
Teaching to the test - context in unseen examinations
Conclusion
RESOURCES - PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS, WEBSITES, READING
Acknowledgements
Index