Using books by Ezra Jack Keats as inspiration, students explore problems and solutions through read-alouds, discussion, and an interactive bulletin board.
Huckleberry Finn opens with a warning from its author that misinterpreting readers will be shot. Despite the danger, readers have been approaching the novel from such diverse critical perspectives for 120 years that it is both commonly taught and frequently banned, for a variety of reasons. Studying both the novel and its critics with an emphasis on cultural context will help students develop analytical tools essential for navigating this work and other American controversies. This lesson asks students to combine internet historical research with critical reading. Then students will produce several writing assignments exploring what readers see in Huckleberry Finn and why they see it that way.
Professor Peter McDonald draws on the work of Indian novelist and literary critic, Amit Chaudhuri, to open up new ways of how we can think about D.H. Lawrence, not only as a Modernist, but also as a Post/Colonial writer. Peter then turns to Lawrence's short story, 'The Woman Who Rode Away' (1924), set in rural Mexico, in order to demonstrate how his literature runs against the grain of distinctly Western modes of thought. This audio recording is part the Interviews on Great Writers series presented by Oxford University Podcasts.
Dr Sally Bayley presents an illuminating reading of Emily Dickinson's 'I started early, took my dog'. In her reading, she seeks out allusions to Shakespearean plays including Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. She then answers questions about the poem. This audio recording is part the Interviews on Great Writers series presented by Oxford University Podcasts.
The activity includes a series of exercises, in which students view the literal representations of idioms and then examine the metaphorical meanings of the idioms.
In one of literature's most haunting denunciations of censorship, Ray Bradbury uses the materials of science fiction to tell the story of Guy Montag, a fireman forced to burn books. The Big Read Reader's Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, time lines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.
A story of love and pain, loyalty and desertion, Ernest Hemingway's World War I novel features the tragedy of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful nurse. This Big Read Teachers Guide contains ten lessons to lead you through Ernest Hemingways classic novel, A Farewell to Arms. Each lesson has four sections: a thematic focus, discussion activities, writing exercises, and homework assignments. In addition, we have provided capstone projects and suggested essay topics, as well as handouts with more background information about the novel, the historical period, and the author. All lessons dovetail with the state language arts standards required in the fiction genre.
A Dust Bowl saga of the Joad family's rough passage to California and the rougher treatment they find there, John Steinbeck's novel is tragedy and comedy, story and allegory, editorial and epic. The Big Read Readers Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, timelines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great american author.
Told through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald's lyrical masterpiece recounts Jay Gatsby's desperate quest to win back his first love as he struggles to recapture the past. The Big Read Readers Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, time lines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.
Combining stylistic virtuosity with a deep understanding of the darkness of the human heart, Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems have haunted readers for more than 150 years. The Big Read Readers Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, timelines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.
In 1758, Samuel Johnson noted that the itch of scribbling had seized the nation. 'The rage of writing has seized the old and young' across all segments of society, he observed, so that now 'the cook warbles her lyrics in the kitchen, and the thrasher vociferates his heroics in the barn.' Johnson's observation drew attention to an important development in the eighteenth century literary world: the emergence of the labouring class writer. Over the course of the century increasing numbers of agricultural labourers, household servants, bricklayers, shoemakers, milkmaids, soldiers and sailors not only tool up writing, but also published their work, and, in some cases, made a significant impact on contemporary literary culture. This collection of resources looks at these writers.
This collection of resources considers the role of Oriental fiction in the development of the English novel in the 18th century.
Poetic miscellanies represent a particularly important and popular mediation of poetry in the eighteenth century, since they represent one of the most visible points of contact between the shaping of the literary canon, and the commercial demands of print culture. Yet they remain little used or studied because of their bewildering number and variety: at the most conservative estimate, there were a thousand published between 1700-1800, yet the contents of most of these are relatively unknown and unexamined. In this collection, you will be able to learn more about and explore some miscellanies from the time.
This collection of resources from Oxford Podcasts focuses Beowulf.
This collection of resources looks at Caribbean writers.
The writers included in this collection of resources present richer understandings of exactly what it means to be a "colonial", to be writing from a "colony". If it is the short stories of Rudyard Kipling, with their subtle critiques of Anglo-Indian society, the bleak ambivalence of Joseph Conrad's winding syntax, or the outright anti-imperial critiques of Olive Schreiner, these writers configure a space that can be considered at least postcolonial, if not anti-colonial, into their fiction.
This collection of resources looks at contemporary post/colonial writers.
Many books and university courses, trying to compensate for a history of the neglect or mistrust of plays as performance, use the phrase "from page to stage" to think about the dramatic possibilities of their texts. In fact, for the early modern theatre, the phrase needs to be the other way around--from stage to page. Plays were performances first, and only later, and then only sometimes, books. This section of Great Writers gathers resources--podcasts, eBooks, websites--to explore the two interconnected lives of the early modern play--as an event in time and space on the stage of the Globe or Blackfriars theatre, and as a material printed object, on sale to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers in the booksellers' quarter around St Paul's Churchyard.
This section brings together resources from the across the Great Writers Inspire site to illustrate how these can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about economic and social literary criticism. The 'Economic and Social Literary Criticism' essay introduces a series of topics and questions and gives examples of resources to explore. It is aimed at teachers, students and anyone who is interested in literature who wants to put text into context and be inspired by Great Writers.
This section brings together resources from the across the Great Writers Inspire site to illustrate how these can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about the political aspects of literature. The 'Feminist Approaches to Literature' essay presents a basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a feminist perspective. It introduces a series of topics and questions and gives examples of resources to explore. It is aimed at teachers, students and anyone who is interested in literature who wants to put text into context and be inspired by Great Writers.