This book examines how Gwendolyn Brooks, a self-proclaimed nonreligious person, advocates adherence to Christian ideals through religious allusions in her poetry. The discussion integrates Brooks' words, biographical data, commentary by other scholars, scriptural references, and doctrinal tenets. It identifies biblical figures and events and highlights Brooks' effective use of the sermon genre, and her express parallels between Christianity and Democracy. The work opens with a biographical chapter and Brooks' comments on religion, followed by analyses of her long poems, and more than thirty of her short ones. An illuminating interview with Nora Brooks Blakely about Brooks' religious background and philosophy is included.

This book examines how Gwendolyn Brooks, a self-proclaimed nonreligious person, advocates adherence to Christian ideals through religious allusions in her poetry. The discussion integrates Brooks' words, biographical data, commentary by other scholars, scriptural references, and doctrinal tenets. It identifies biblical figures and events and highlights Brooks' effective use of the sermon genre, and her express parallels between Christianity and Democracy. The work opens with a biographical chapter and Brooks' comments on religion, followed by analyses of her long poems, and more than thirty of her short ones. An illuminating interview with Nora Brooks Blakely about Brooks' religious background and philosophy is included.

Introduces students to the diversity of their literary culture. Through its discussions, expanded canon, critical perspectives, and juxtapositions of similar works by authors from different periods or traditions, the book encourages investigations of literature.

[The editors's] practice is to place [nontraditional or contemporary] works where they belong, alongside the "classics": to integrate new with old, familiar with unfamiliar, inviting students to discover new works and to see familiar works in new contexts. Thus, [their] goal in this anthology remains what is has been from the start: not just to expand the literary canon, but also to expand the personal canons of both students and instructors ... [The goal is] to encourage students both to appreciate works representing diverse literary subjects, styles, and perspectives and to recognize their own roles in bringing these diverse works into their personal literary canons by reading, reacting to, and writing about them.-Pref.