Understanding Literature

Understanding Literature is an innovative anthology and technology package representing the next generation of literary pedagogy for introduction to literature and literature for composition courses. Built on a balanced foundation of canonical and nontraditional reading selections, this text includes discussions of the formal literary elements--and integrates relevant and accessible coverage of contemporary criticism. This unique, integrated coverage of contemporary critical approaches offers students a richer, more engaging introduction to reading critically and writing about literature.

Presents twenty-three oral interpetations of short stories, poems, nonfiction, epic poetry, and drama, mostly from English and American literature. Includes works by Saki, O. Henry, Toni Cade Bambara, Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare, Homer, and others. Primarily geared for classroom learning.

To really understand and appreciate literature, one should be able to find out how a writer creates an effect and produces an impression; of wit, humour, tragedy or comedy. The questions which follow the poems and the short stories help one to find out how writers use language in different ways to create, these effects.

Literature and Understanding investigates the cognitive gain from literature by focussing on a reader’s close analysis of a literary text. It examines the meaning of ‘literature’, outlines the most prominent positions in the literary cognitivism debate, explores the practice of close reading from a philosophical perspective, provides a fresh account of what we mean by ‘understanding’ and in so doing opens up a new area of research in the philosophy of literature. This book provides a different reply to the challenge that we can’t learn anything worthwhile from reading literary fiction. It makes the innovative case that reading literary fiction as literature rather than as fiction stimulates five relevant senses of understanding. The book uses examples of irony, metaphor, play with perspective and ambiguity to illustrate this contention. Before arguing that these five senses of understanding bridge the gap between our understanding of a literary text and our understanding of the world beyond that text. The book will be of great interest for researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory, literature in education and pedagogy.

An introduction to the appreciation and critical analysis of literature.

This study examines the development and characteristics of various historical and contemporary genres of Korean literature. It presents explanations on the development of Korean literacy and offers a history of literary criticism, traditional and modern, giving the discussion an historical context.

This volume critically discusses the role empathy plays in different processes of understanding. More precisely, it clarifies empathy’s role in interpersonal understanding and appreciating works of literature and art. The volume also includes a section on historical theories of empathy’s role in understanding. When it comes to understanding other persons, empathy is typically seen as a process that enables the empathizer to recognize a target person’s mental states, a process which is in turn seen as “understanding” this person. This volume, however, explores empathy’s role in understanding beyond mere mental state recognition. With contributions on processes of interpersonal understanding and understanding of literature and art, it provides readers with an overview over both differences and similarities regarding empathy’s epistemic role in two rather different areas. Since important roots of the debate about empathic understanding lie at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the historical section of the volume focusses specifically on this period. Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics and the history of philosophy, as well as in literary studies and art history.

Children's literature continues to be one of the most rapidly expanding and exciting of interdisciplinary academic studies, of interest to anyone concerned with literature, education, internationalism, childhood or culture in general. The second edition of Peter Hunt's bestselling International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature offers comprehensive coverage of the subject across the world, with substantial, accessible, articles by specialists and world-ranking experts. Almost everything is here, from advanced theory to the latest practice – from bibliographical research to working with books and children with special needs. This edition has been expanded and includes over fifty new articles. All of the other articles have been updated, substantially revised or rewritten, or have revised bibliographies. New topics include Postcolonialism, Comparative Studies, Ancient Texts, Contemporary Children's Rhymes and Folklore, Contemporary Comics, War, Horror, Series Fiction, Film, Creative Writing, and 'Crossover' literature. The international section has been expanded to reflect world events, and now includes separate articles on countries such as the Baltic states, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Iran, Korea, Mexico and Central America, Slovenia, and Taiwan.