Now in its second edition, How to Read Texts introduces students to key critical approaches to literary texts and offers a practical introduction for students developing their own critical and close-reading skills. Written in a lively, jargon-free style, it explains critical concepts, approaches and ideas including: - Debates around critical theory - The role of history and context - The links between creativity and criticism - The relationship between author, reader and text. The new edition now includes guidance on analysing a range of multi-media texts, including film and online media as well as the purely literary. In addition to new practical examples, readings, exercises and 'checkpoints' that help students to build confidence in their own critical readings of both primary and secondary texts, the book now also offers guidance on writing fully-formed critical essays and tips for independent research. Comprehensively updated and revised throughout, How to Read Texts is an indispensible guide for students making the transition to university study.

Historical fiction is a hugely popular genre of fiction providing fictional accounts or dramatizations of historical figures or events. This latest guide in the highly successful Bloomsbury Must-Reads series depicts 100 of the finest novels published in this sector, with a further 500 recommendations. A wide range of classic works and key authors are covered: Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Attwood, Sarah Waters, Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson to name a few. If you want to expand your reading in this area, or gain a deeper understanding of the genre - this is the best place to start! Inside you'll find: - An extended Introduction to historical fiction - 100 titles highlighted A-Z by novel with 500 Read-on recommendations - Read-on-a-theme categories - Award winners and book club recommendations

European and American scholars from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries thought that all societies passed through the same developmental stages, from primitive to advanced. Implicit in this developmental paradigm—one that has affected generations of thought on societal development—was the assumption that one could "read history sideways." That is, one could see what the earlier stages of a modern Western society looked like by examining contemporaneous so-called primitive societies in other parts of the world. In Reading History Sideways, leading family scholar Arland Thornton demonstrates how this approach, though long since discredited, has permeated Western ideas and values about the family. Further, its domination of social science for centuries caused the misinterpretation of Western trends in family structure, marriage, fertility, and parent-child relations. Revisiting the "developmental fallacy," Thornton here traces its central role in changes in the Western world, from marriage to gender roles to adolescent sexuality. Through public policies, aid programs, and colonialism, it continues to reshape families in non-Western societies as well.

Zen and the Art of Local History is an engaging, interactive conversation that conveys the exciting nature of local history. Divided into six major themes the book covers the scope and breadth of local history: • Being a Local Historian • Topics and Sources • Staying Relevant • Getting it Right • Writing History • History Organizations Each chapter features one of Carol Kammen’s memorable editorials from History News. Her editorial is a “call.” Each is followed by a response from one of more than five dozen prominent players in state and local history. These Respondents include local and public historians, archivists, volunteers, and history professionals across the kaleidoscopic spectrum of local history. Among this group are Katherine Kane, Robert “Bob” Richmond, Charlie Bryan, and Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko. The result is a series of dialogues on important topics in the field of local history. This interactivity of these conversations makes Zen and the Art of Local History a unique offering in the public history field.

This book offers a critical account of historical books about Britain written for children, including realist novels, non-fiction, fantasy and alternative histories. It also investigates the literary, ideological and philosophical challenges involved in writing about the past, especially for an audience whose knowledge of history is often limited.

"If you're a parent who has decided to educate your children yourself, this book is the first you should buy."—?Washington Times The Well-Trained Mind will instruct you, step by step, on how to give your child an academically rigorous, comprehensive education from preschool through high school—one that will train him or her to read, to think, to ?understand?, to be well-rounded and curious about learning. Veteran home educators Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer outline the classical pattern of education called the trivium, which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind and comprises three stages: the elementary school "grammar stage," the middle school "logic stage," and the high school "rhetoric stage." Using this theory as your model, you'll be able to instruct your child in all levels of reading, writing, history, geography, mathematics, science, foreign languages, rhetoric, logic, art, and music, regardless of your own aptitude in those subjects. This newly revised edition contains completely updated ordering information for all curricula and books, new and expanded curricula recommendations, new material on using computers and distance-learning resources, answers to common questions about home education, information about educational support groups, and advice on practical matters such as working with your local school board, preparing a high school transcript, and applying to colleges.

This collection of Robert Dawidoff's essays and journalism is peopled by the likes of the Founding Fathers, Fred Astaire, Henry and William James, Sophie Tucker, Trent Lott, and Cole Porter. Drawing together this unlikely cast of characters, Dawidoff probes into the role of outsider groups as well as intellectual and political elites in the formation of American culture. As a scholar of intellectual and cultural history, Dawidoff takes the stance that historians ought to take an active role in our democratic culture, informing and participating in public discourse. He argues for a broad reach when it comes to cultural expression, resisting the polarization of formal intellectual history and folk or commercial popular culture. In his view and in his book, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Katharine Hepburn are equally worthy topics for a historian's consideration, providing that they are treated with equal seriousness of purpose and analytic rigor. In "The Gay Nineties" section that closes the book, he traces key events in the continual struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights and takes on such unresolved issues as safer sex, needle exchange programs to control HIV transmission, and the public controversy around the portrayal of gay and lesbian television characters. Divided into sections that deal with the patriarchs of American political and intellectual culture, expressive culture, and a historian's public voice, this book is a model of engaged and engaging writing. Accessible and witty, Making History Matter will appeal to general and academic readers interested in American history as well as gay and lesbian political and cultural issues. Author note: Robert Dawidoff is John D. and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Chair and Professor of History at Claremont Graduate University. He is most recently the author (with Michael Nava) of Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America and The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture V. Democracy in Adams, James and Santayana.

The historical novel has been one of the most important forms of women's reading and writing in the twentieth century, yet it has been consistently under-rated and critically neglected. In the first major study of British women writers' use of the genre, Diana Wallace tracks its development across the century. She combines a comprehensive survey with detailed readings of key writers, including Naomi Mitchison, Georgette Heyer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Margaret Irwin, Jean Plaidy, Mary Renault, Philippa Gregory and Pat Barker.

Reproduction of the original: The Book-Lover by James Baldwin