Written by influential scholar-critic and award-winning Daniel R. Schwarz, In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century is a passionate and joyful defense of the pleasures of reading. This stimulating book provides valuable insights for teachers and students on why we read and how we read when we embark on "the odyssey of reading."

Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Western Music in Context)

Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries explores the sense of possibility unleashed by the era's destabilizing military conflicts, social upheavals, and technological advances. Auner shows how the multiplicity of musical styles has called into question traditional assumptions about compositional practice, the boundaries of music and noise, and the relationship among composer, performer, and listener. He also shows how composers and their works have played important roles in defining ideas of nation, race, and gender, and thus in shaping the modern world for better and worse.

Scientific Exploration and Expeditions: From the Age of Discovery to the Twenty-first Century

This two-volume set, aimed at middle-school students, provides information on explorers and scientists, as well as their expeditions and investigations, in eighty articles. Beginning with the "Age of Discovery" (that is, approximately 1420, the time of Prince Henry the Navigator), this set summarizes the most important discoveries in fields from polar exploration and paleontology to African explorers, archeology, and anthropology, covering events up to mid-2009.

Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century

Most of the contributions to Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century evolve from a practical commitment to the translation of Shakespearean drama and at the same time reveal a sophisticated awareness of recent developments in literary criticism, Shakespeare studies, and the relatively new field of Translation studies. All the essays are sensitive to the criticism to which notions of the original as well as distinctions between the creative and the derivative have been subjected in recent years. Consequently, they endeavour to retrieve translation from its otherwise subordinate status, and advance it as a model for all writing, which is construed, inevitably, as a rewriting.

Twenty-First Century Novels: The First Decade, Volume 1-3

Twenty-First Century Novels: The First Decade examines some of the most important fictional works published from 2000 to 2009. In order to help both students and casual readers develop a deeper understanding of these works, each title is covered in an entry that discusses style, characters, critical reception, and cultural and historical contexts, and provides recommendations of related materials and resources.