Writing

Now available in paperback, From Battlefields Rising explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war's impact on the individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted. Whitman's poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers; off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that Emily Dickinson was writing from afar; and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers. Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America's early idealism-and consequently its literature-into something far more ambivalent and raw.

An absorbing group portrait of the period's most important writers, From Battlefields Rising flashes with forgotten historical details and elegant new ideas. It alters previous perceptions about the evolution of American literature and how Americans have understood and expressed their common history.

The fifth edition of the MLA Handbook is revamped for the Internet age. A complete toolbox for online research, this edition offers guidance in
-- finding research materials online
-- judging the quality of information on the Internet
-- using expanded and updated MLA formats to document a wide variety of online sources
-- preparing texts in electronic form

The MLA Handbook's authoritative guidelines on research practices and MLA style are enhanced in other ways. New topics have been added, and citation examples, the list of suggested writing guides, and the appendix of reference works by field have been expanded and updated.

The fifth edition serves as both a classroom text and a reference book for students and writers to use independently. Teachers and students of writing, literature, languages, philosophy, and other humanities fields will find this guide indispensable.

For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders' Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father's striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen's own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self-each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer's life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, "Tiger Writing" radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

Inside The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickens, readers take a journey into the classically humorous and almost goofy side of one of the most famous writers in world history. readers will find a timeline of Charles Dickens's Life, several short stories, a whole chapter of Dickens's bumblings, and quotes from some of Dickens's most famous papers.

Dickens was a wonderfully smart child who excelled in school but became a victim of poverty. In his later years, this childhood of poverty would influence him greatly and a great deal of his material was based on this life. When his father was sent to prison, Dickens's mother and siblings accompanied his father and went to live inside the prison in one small room while Charles was sent into lodgings beside the prison and worked at a blacking factory.

The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickenstakes Dickens's lovers through a history of some of his lesser-known stories and introduces the reader to a side of Dickens that may not have been seen before, the wickedly entertaining and funny side. The beautifully bound hardcover will look incredible resting on anyone's coffee table or bookshelf and can be considered a collectible book. Researched and compiled by Shelley Klein, this book is a must-have for any Classic Literature fan who is a current or former fan of Dickens.