This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

Featuring cutting-edge essays by leading scholars, this collection formulates a new feminist theory of eighteenth-century women's satire.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

Seeking to honor and extend the critical legacy of Howard Weinbrot, this volume re-examines, rebuilds, and upgrades the most prominent pillars of long eighteenth-century scholarship. The collection is divided into four thematic sections, beginning with a series of chapters offering fresh analyses of Swift, Dryden, Hogarth, and other major authors and artists of the period. In the sections that follow, the contributors not only explore biographies of both highly esteemed figures and notorious deviants, but also investigate the very concept of Enlightenment as it has evolved from the eighteenth century to today. The final section features chapters that probe the complex interaction of identity, persona, and place, traversing the countless locales in which the British—and the international—eighteenth century emerged. The volume ultimately covers a range of experience that extends from the gallows to the landscape garden and from heroic antiquity to Romantic-era France. Juxtaposing the local and particular against the grand and universal, Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment testifies to the complexity and ongoing significance of eighteenth-century culture.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates, and academics. Situating the novel in multiple frameworks, including contextual considerations and literary histories, the book asks new questions about the novel's significance in an age in which authoritarianism finds itself freshly empowered.

In an age where science and technology hold sway and the humanities face a crisis, this book explores the evolving role of literature. It delves into how American self-help culture shapes contemporary ideals of success, mindfulness, and happiness, with a particular focus on its influence in science communication, notably in TED talks. Moreover, it underscores the enduring relevance of literature in the digital era by analyzing speculative novels that challenge established norms, including those propagated by TED. These novels include Richard Powers' Generosity: An Enhancement, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. They question the Western preference for visual perception, which perpetuates a human-centric worldview. By focusing on literary synesthesia in the readings, this book emphasizes sensory experiences and human-nonhuman interactions. It adopts the concept of research as assemblage and uses a diverse range of theories and approaches, while it foregrounds critical posthumanism and new materialism. Ultimately, it advocates for a less anthropocentric approach to reading and presents literature as a "transdisciplinary life science" capable of fostering a "kinship of posthumanity."

The twenty million students now pursuing higher education in America are paying more than history, culture and the consumer price index can possibly justify, while the product they are purchasing is one that has become systematically debased. General education has been depreciated, core curricula eroded, expectations (at all levels) reduced. Slightly above half of the currently-enrolled students are graduating and only half of those are finding employment commensurate with what was once understood to be an authentic college education. Many are saddled with crippling debt, a particularly cruel reality for those who are unemployed or underemployed and unable to remove their debts via bankruptcy. Commentators now refer to the college campus as a country club or a daycare facility, one that is populated by a host of counselors, tutors and hand-holders who serve an often unprepared or underprepared student body. Remedial courses are commonplace, even with the systematic reduction of expectations. Among competing nations, international tests place our 15 year-olds no higher than 19th in three critical categories. Many now speak of "K-16 education" as our colleges replicate the atmosphere and behaviors of our grammar and high schools. How did we reach this point? How did the erosion of faculty and curricular authority occur within our institutions of higher learning? What roles were played by the radical students of the 1960s? How did our colleges of education contribute to the problem? How did corporatist administrators replace academic leaders and leverage ideologies to extend bureaucracy, attract and secure tuition dollars at any intellectual cost and create self-serving career paths for individuals running across the cracking ice of ineptitude and a lack of personal commitment? Most important, how can we reverse this process, recapture the relevant strengths of past practices, escape the gray vocationalism we now encounter at every turn and return to principles and standards that can legitimately be termed authentic? How can we save the previously-marginalized students who suffer the most within the current system? These are the questions posed by this book.