War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse--unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers' intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse, Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators of the conflict: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
When boarding-school fiction became popular in the 19th century, it tended to be warm and nostalgic, filled with sporting events, practical jokes, and schemes to get even with campus bullies. All of that changed in the era discussed in this book. Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, drops out of one prep school and is expelled from two others. The conflicts between students in John Knowles's Devon School novels become so heated that two young men die.
The Risk of Reading is a defense of the idea that deep and close readings of literature can help us to understand ourselves and the world around us. It explores some of the meaning and implications of modern life through the deep reading of significant books. Waxler argues that we need "fiction" to give our so-called "real life" meaning and that reading narrative fiction remains crucial to the making of a humane and democratic society.
Designed to be clear and simple, How to Write Anything re-imagines how texts work, with support for students wherever they are in their writing process. The Guide, in Parts 1 and 2, lays out focused advice for writing common genres, while the Reference, in Parts 3 through 9, covers the range of writing and research skills that students need as they work across genres and disciplines. Intuitive cross-referencing and a modular chapter organization that’s simple to follow make it easy for students to work back and forth between the chapters and still stay focused on their own writing.
This deeply moving collection of poetry by Renato Rosaldo focuses on the shock of his wife Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo's sudden death on October 11, 1981. Just the day before, Shelly and her family had arrived in the northern Philippines village of Mungayang, where she and her husband Renato, both accomplished anthropologists, planned to conduct fieldwork. On the eleventh of October, Shelly died after losing her footing and falling some sixty feet from a cliff into a swollen river. Renato Rosaldo explored the relationship between bereavement and rage in his canonical essay, "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," which first appeared in 1984 and is reprinted here.
