Teaching Early Modern English Literature From The Archives

The availability of digital editions of early modern works brings a wealth of exciting archival and primary source materials into the classroom. But electronic archives can be overwhelming and hard to use, for teachers and students alike, and digitization can distort or omit information about texts. Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives places traditional and electronic archives in conversation, outlines practical methods for incorporating them into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and addresses the theoretical issues involved in studying them. The volume discusses a range of physical and virtual archives from 1473 to 1700 that are useful in the teaching of early modern literature--both major sources and rich collections that are less known (including affordable or free options for those with limited institutional resources). Although the volume focuses on English literature and culture, essays discuss a wide range of comparative approaches involving Latin, French, Spanish, German, and early American texts and explain how to incorporate visual materials, ballads, domestic treatises, atlases, music, and historical documents into the teaching of literature.

This innovative project unites leading scholars of English, History and French to examine the challenges of teaching early modern literature, history and culture within higher education. The volume sets out a variety of approaches to teaching the period and aims to revitalize the connection between teaching and research.

This volume examines the relationship between gender and form in early modern women's writing by exploring women's debts to and appropriations of different literary genres and offering practical suggestions for the teaching of women's texts.

Digital Milton is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton’s geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come.

Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the discourse of human rights has expanded to include not just civil and political rights but economic, social, cultural, and, most recently, collective rights. Given their broad scope, human rights issues are useful touchstones in the humanities classroom and benefit from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural pedagogy in which objects of study are situated in historical, legal, philosophical, literary, and rhetorical contexts. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies is a sourcebook of inventive approaches and best practices for teachers looking to make human rights the focus of their undergraduate and graduate courses. Contributors first explore what it means to be human and conceptual issues such as law and the state. Next, they approach human rights and related social-justice issues from the perspectives of particular geographic regions and historical eras, through the lens of genre, and in relation to specific rights violations--for example, storytelling and testimonio in Latin America or poetry created in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Essays then describe efforts to cultivate students' capacity for ethical reading practices and to deepen their understanding of the stakes and artistic dimensions of human rights representations, drawing on active learning and experimental class contexts. The final section, on resources, directs readers to further readings in history, criticism, theory, and literary and visual studies and provides a chronology of human rights legal documents.

In the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Latin American authors found themselves writing for a new audience in both Latin America and Spain and in an ideologically charged climate as the Cold War found another focus in the Cuban Revolution. The writers who emerged in this energized cultural moment--among others, Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), José Donoso (Chile), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Manuel Puig (Argentina), and Mario Varas Llosa (Peru)--experimented with narrative forms that sometimes bore a vexed relation to the changing political situations of Latin America. This volume provides a wide range of options for teaching the complexities of the Boom, explores the influence of Boom works and authors, presents different frameworks for thinking about the Boom, proposes ways to approach it in the classroom, and provides resources for selecting materials for courses.

When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he reportedly greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War." To this day, Uncle Tom's Cabin serves as a touchstone for the war. Yet few works have been selected to represent the Civil War's literature, even though historians have filled libraries with books on the war itself. This volume helps teachers address the following questions: What is the relation of canonical works to the multitude of occasional texts that were penned in response to the Civil War, and how can students understand them together? Should an approach to war literature reflect the chronology of historical events or focus instead on thematic clusters, generic forms, and theoretical concerns? How do we introduce students to archival materials that sometimes support, at other times resist, the close reading practices in which they have been trained? Twenty-three essays cover such topics as visiting historical sites to teach the literature, using digital materials, teaching with anthologies; soldiers' dime novels, Confederate women's diaries, songs, speeches; the conflicted theme of treason, and the double-edged theme of brotherhood; how battlefield photographs synthesize fact and fiction; and the roles in the war played by women, by slaves, and by African American troops. A section of the volume provides a wealth of resources for teachers.

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the plays' critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online The blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays. Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.