Writers
What are some tricks for getting rid of writers block?
I have writers block that comes and goes and I need to find a way to get rid of my writers block. It can sometimes be so bad I can barley make sentences. Any tips?
While writer’s block is difficult to deal with, there are some simple techniques that can really help all writers. When I was in seventh grade, I needed to write a series of vignettes, such as those of Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street.” I had a TERRIBLE case of writer’s block, and I used that to my benefit. I wrote a short story about a wall that blocked ideas from exiting my brain and going to my hands to write it, and it turned into one of my favorite stories I’ve written.
Keep a small notebook on you at all times, because you never know when an idea will pop into your head. An idea can come to you any time, such as when you’re on the train, walking through the park, or on an airplane, and you might not have anywhere to log the idea. I was once walking down the street, and saw this boy who looked so forlorn, and I took a notebook, and when I got onto the bus, I took out my notebook and began writing a back-story to the boy — why was he so upset? What happened to make him upset? From that, I got several ideas for different stories, one of which I am done with, and one that might become a novella. If you have a notebook and pen or pencil on hand, you are always close to something where you can log everything that comes from your mind. Ideas can come at any time, so it’s good to be prepared for a flash of genius that will inevitably come.
If I have writer’s block, I sometimes just write random words, and hopefully some idea will come from that. Take a pencil, or an empty Word document and just begin typing or writing words. Something is bound to hit you eventually. I used to just do these exercises where I did nothing but write random sentences without using punctuation. This helped my brain juices to flow, and it allowed me to write some short poems and short, short stories. Sometimes that rare moment when two words fit together perfectly to give you a great idea for a story occurs, and who knows? Maybe those two words can launch a series of books, or a series of plays, or the great American novel.
I draw inspiration from everything when I have writer’s block. I take inspiration from news stories, from YouTube videos, music, a story my friend told me, your own personal experiences, and anything and everything in between. It’s not wrong to get ideas from everyday things such as a news story about a gay teenager committing suicide, or an attempt terrorist attack of an airplane. If you do end up using something like a news story, you have to make it your own. Keep that in mind if you do use those things as your inspiration.
“Writer’s Digest | Writing Prompts”
http://www.writersdigest.com/WritingPrompts/
“Creative Writing Prompts”
http://www.creativewritingprompts.com/
“Writing Topics”
http://www.thewritesource.com/writing_topics/
The last advice I can give you is to keep at it. Don’t give up because you don’t have an idea. Go for a walk, get some air, go for a drive, go get some food, or do something that can help your brain work, and then you can get some ideas. Never give up, and push through the writer’s block, because something brilliant is bound to come out of writer’s block.
☮ and ♥
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”A contested sight/site”: British constructions of Ceylon in visual and literary texts, 1850–1910. $49.99 This dissertation explores the problematic construction of colonial Ceylon in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the context of colonial transaction, and provides a nuanced account of how the colonial perspective in Ceylon can be theorized. Wresting the theorizing of colonial representation of Ceylon away from the dominance of a patriarchal, euro-centric and hetero sexist framework, this study opens up new perspectives on issues such as colonial vision, representation, the gaze, the picturesque, race and gender in Ceylon. The heart of this dissertation lies in a three-part argument. First, Ceylon is recast as a dynamic site of gendered and racial interaction. Second, the perspective of the colonizer is shown to be far more complex and entangled than a schema of a simple colonizer/colonized identity will allow. Third, marginalized voices and subjectivities are investogated within white representational practices in Ceylon, highlighting conflicting viewpoints which are frequently silenced and made peripheral.;In order to theorize the colonial perspective in Ceylon outside of an ethnographic, orientalist and exoticist narrative, the first chapter reexamines Julia Margaret Cameron’s Ceylonese photographs, exploring ways in which images of local women complicate romantic fictions which surround Victorian discourses of Ceylon. Chapter two investigates how the issue of gender ambiguity of Sinhalese men in British representations disrupts notions of colonial masculinity, allowing white Victorian women artists and travel writers to construct alternative sites/sights. Chapter three argues that the picturesque cannot constitute an ideological frame through which the island can be described as it is fractured by a series of competing gazes which operate in Ceylon. The fourth chapter retrieves local voices that contend with orientalist discourses of Ceylon in an ambivalent manner, to demonstrate that multiple determinations complicate local reactions, revealing |
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”A kind of thing that might be”: Toward a poetics of new media. $49.99 This dissertation examines new media by taking as its starting point the definition offered by Lev Manovich, “the shift of all culture to computer culture”—new media are new not so much because they have not existed before but because they must adhere to the conventions of a computer. Media, according to Manovich, become programmable, and in their new programmability, along with a host of other implications and repercussions of that programmability, we human beings experience something new. Articulating that something remains no easy chore, and Manovich continually makes his case that “the language of new media” much resembles the language of that older medium, cinema. However, to nod in agreement with Manovich is not the present task; instead, I take Manovich and place his notion of new media in direct dialogue with rhetorical theorists Aristotle, Plato, Kenneth Burke, Barry Brummett, Jeffery Walker, Michel Foucault, and other writers and thinkers in order to pursue a portion of that “shift of all culture”: I ask, “If new media has a language, what is the poetics of that language?” In order to pursue an answer to this question, I take individual new media objects—the film Saving Private Ryan; the video game Medal of Honor: Frontline; the computer worm MyDoom; the media coverage of the 1996 presidential campaign trail, including the “Dean Scream”; the SanDisk’s cooperation with the Alzheimer’s Association’s “Take Action against Alzheimer’s” campaign; the film The Manchurian Candidate; and the modern database—and analyze how they make meaning. In order to do this, I frequently reach back into antiquity, specifically into the early and predisciplinary areas of philosophy, rhetoric, and poetics. |
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”A kind of thing that might be”: Toward a poetics of new media. $49.99 This dissertation examines new media by taking as its starting point the definition offered by Lev Manovich, “the shift of all culture to computer culture”—new media are new not so much because they have not existed before but because they must adhere to the conventions of a computer. Media, according to Manovich, become programmable, and in their new programmability, along with a host of other implications and repercussions of that programmability, we human beings experience something new. Articulating that something remains no easy chore, and Manovich continually makes his case that “the language of new media” much resembles the language of that older medium, cinema. However, to nod in agreement with Manovich is not the present task; instead, I take Manovich and place his notion of new media in direct dialogue with rhetorical theorists Aristotle, Plato, Kenneth Burke, Barry Brummett, Jeffery Walker, Michel Foucault, and other writers and thinkers in order to pursue a portion of that “shift of all culture”: I ask, “If new media has a language, what is the poetics of that language?” In order to pursue an answer to this question, I take individual new media objects—the film Saving Private Ryan; the video game Medal of Honor: Frontline; the computer worm MyDoom; the media coverage of the 1996 presidential campaign trail, including the “Dean Scream”; the SanDisk’s cooperation with the Alzheimer’s Association’s “Take Action against Alzheimer’s” campaign; the film The Manchurian Candidate; and the modern database—and analyze how they make meaning. In order to do this, I frequently reach back into antiquity, specifically into the early and predisciplinary areas of philosophy, rhetoric, and poetics. |
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”A voice that was thin and pure:” Folklore as literature and literature as folklore in the works of Byron Herbert Reece. $49.99 As a folklorist and a student of literature, I am always looking for connections—patterns, as Henry Glassie would put it—that link oral traditions and the written word, constantly applying my knowledge of verbal folklore, such as the Child ballads, folktales, and jokes, to my understanding of literary works. Byron Herbert Reece’s poetry and prose draws directly from traditional ballad forms—the old mountain “love songs” such as those catalogued by Child and later popularized on radio and in the folk revival movement. Reece’s style and craft echo various genres of oral traditions. Reece’s biography and his own ideas and thoughts on the ballad suggest that he learned much of what he knew of poetry from the ballads sung by family and neighbors in the Choestoe Valley, just south of Blairsville, Georgia.;Yet, these elements do not merely function as stylistic embellishment or to bring authenticity to the story—here, the folklore is the story. Unlike many writers who have utilized folklore in their work, Reece maintains intimacy with his community and its traditions throughout his life. Reece’s work not only reads like folklore, but functions like folklore as well. As with the oral forms of Reece’s community, Reece’s works express the values, fears, anxieties, hopes, and worldview of himself and the people he held most dear. Here, Reece is performer; his audience, his readers. Here, literature is an evolutionary stage of folklore, not a separate entity borrowing from folk genres.;This dissertation examines the relationship between Reece’s literature and the folklore of his native Appalachians, analyzing the thin space between literature and folklore. By tracing the patterns shared by Reece’s work and the living traditions of his native Choestoe, we gain a perspective on Reece in which the author and his poetry and prose serve as a bridge between two spheres—oral tradition and literature—and reminds us of the organic nature of communication and the intrinsic |
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”A voice that was thin and pure:” Folklore as literature and literature as folklore in the works of Byron Herbert Reece. $49.99 As a folklorist and a student of literature, I am always looking for connections—patterns, as Henry Glassie would put it—that link oral traditions and the written word, constantly applying my knowledge of verbal folklore, such as the Child ballads, folktales, and jokes, to my understanding of literary works. Byron Herbert Reece’s poetry and prose draws directly from traditional ballad forms—the old mountain “love songs” such as those catalogued by Child and later popularized on radio and in the folk revival movement. Reece’s style and craft echo various genres of oral traditions. Reece’s biography and his own ideas and thoughts on the ballad suggest that he learned much of what he knew of poetry from the ballads sung by family and neighbors in the Choestoe Valley, just south of Blairsville, Georgia.;Yet, these elements do not merely function as stylistic embellishment or to bring authenticity to the story—here, the folklore is the story. Unlike many writers who have utilized folklore in their work, Reece maintains intimacy with his community and its traditions throughout his life. Reece’s work not only reads like folklore, but functions like folklore as well. As with the oral forms of Reece’s community, Reece’s works express the values, fears, anxieties, hopes, and worldview of himself and the people he held most dear. Here, Reece is performer; his audience, his readers. Here, literature is an evolutionary stage of folklore, not a separate entity borrowing from folk genres.;This dissertation examines the relationship between Reece’s literature and the folklore of his native Appalachians, analyzing the thin space between literature and folklore. By tracing the patterns shared by Reece’s work and the living traditions of his native Choestoe, we gain a perspective on Reece in which the author and his poetry and prose serve as a bridge between two spheres—oral tradition and literature—and reminds us of the organic nature of communication and the intrinsic |
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”Cheating the cheaters”: The confidence artist in postwar American literature. $49.99 This project explores the ways in which the confidence artist in post-World War II American literature works to subvert and destabilize a culturally pervasive practice that Martin Heidegger terms “Enframing,” a scientific mode of thought and behavior that objectifies human beings with the ultimate goal of power and domination. Enframing divests its practitioners of the ability to recognize the otherness of the self or the other, an ability upon which the capacities for love and freedom are founded. While Herman Melville’s Confidence Man highlights the dark underside of the ideals of the nineteenth century frontier, the twentieth century confidence artists I discuss draw attention to the destructive potentialities of the “New Frontier” of science as intellectual and material capital. Focusing primarily on works by Flannery O’Connor, Don DeLillo, Ken Kesey, David Mamet, and Han Ong, this project explores the ways the confidence artists in each work undermine this dangerous pattern of technological fundamentalism.;They are paradoxical and ambiguous figures because even while they are experts at human taxonomy, they make their own identity impenetrable and incalculable to their victims. Those being deceived are individuals whose humanity has been eroded by their own habitual practice of Enframing, who, in their calculative thinking, have objectified themselves and others. In their deceptions, these confidence artists expose the hollowness, inadequacy, and hypocrisy of the belief systems of their victims—potentially to the victims themselves. In this sense, they function as restorative agents for their victims. For the writers considered in this study, an apprehension or acknowledgement the otherness, mystery, and incomprehensibility of the self and the other is the precondition to any sort of restoration. In some of these works, those being deceived include the readers, as the most significant deception is wrought not by the confidence character within the text at |
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”Genius Loci-Spirit of Place” for orchestra. $49.99 Genius Loci, from the Latin “spirit of place,” refers to the unique atmosphere of a place. Composers, writers and artists throughout history have been inspired by place. Genius Loci—Spirit of Place is my own exploration of the meaning of “place.” The piece is not a representation of place but instead represents the distinctive residue of a place that inspires expression.;The spirit of place is in itself organic to music, a time-based art. It is the essence, the residue, of the opening that emanates throughout a composition as “place,” or as a marker, for the composer and listener alike. In music of the classical period this sense of initial place is often referred to as home, as in the home key, and one of the period’s preeminent formal designs is the journey away from that opening place and an eventual return home.;Similarly, Genius Loci-Spirit of Place, emanates from its opening gesture. “Place” here is in the intervallic pitch-relationship of D♭–C–B♭, the music’s distinctive register, its bell-like character, as well as the repeated octave that creates an open harmonic sound world full of possibilities. What follows grows organically out of the spirit of that place and informs the remainder of the work. The opening gesture, for example, leads to the structural and registral climax of Genius Loci—Spirit of Place in measure 93. The descending pitches C-B-A (transposed from the opening), via a sequential progression toward the low register, initiate this climax in a slow build-up that starts in measure 76. This moment also coincides with a rhythmic and metric ‘coming-together’ of the beat. A return to the opening harmony, at the point of release of tension from the climax in measure 99, restores a sense of place. This homecoming is further emphasized by the return of the octave in its distinctive opening register. The spirit of place is the underlying current that flows throughout the entire composition. |
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”Genius Loci-Spirit of Place” for orchestra. $49.99 Genius Loci, from the Latin “spirit of place,” refers to the unique atmosphere of a place. Composers, writers and artists throughout history have been inspired by place. Genius Loci—Spirit of Place is my own exploration of the meaning of “place.” The piece is not a representation of place but instead represents the distinctive residue of a place that inspires expression.;The spirit of place is in itself organic to music, a time-based art. It is the essence, the residue, of the opening that emanates throughout a composition as “place,” or as a marker, for the composer and listener alike. In music of the classical period this sense of initial place is often referred to as home, as in the home key, and one of the period’s preeminent formal designs is the journey away from that opening place and an eventual return home.;Similarly, Genius Loci-Spirit of Place, emanates from its opening gesture. “Place” here is in the intervallic pitch-relationship of D♭–C–B♭, the music’s distinctive register, its bell-like character, as well as the repeated octave that creates an open harmonic sound world full of possibilities. What follows grows organically out of the spirit of that place and informs the remainder of the work. The opening gesture, for example, leads to the structural and registral climax of Genius Loci—Spirit of Place in measure 93. The descending pitches C-B-A (transposed from the opening), via a sequential progression toward the low register, initiate this climax in a slow build-up that starts in measure 76. This moment also coincides with a rhythmic and metric ‘coming-together’ of the beat. A return to the opening harmony, at the point of release of tension from the climax in measure 99, restores a sense of place. This homecoming is further emphasized by the return of the octave in its distinctive opening register. The spirit of place is the underlying current that flows throughout the entire composition. |
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”Girl, Colored” and Other Stories: A Complete Short Fiction Anthology of African American Women Writers in The Crisis Magazine, 1910-2010 $75 As the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP,) The Crisis is one of the longest running African American journals in the history of American publishing. Throughout its century-long publication, The Crisis has made immeasurable contributions to the careers of several female African American writers, including Anita Scott Coleman, Mary Church Terrell, and Jessie Fauset. This anthology collects all of the short stories published in The Crisis by African American women during the magazine’s first century of publication, offering an historical, literary, and cultural perspective on the lives of African American women from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. |
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”My country is the whole world”: ”Three Guineas” and the culture of pacifist dissent. $49.99 Virginia Woolf, like many women writers, is notorious for having purged the most subversive political content from her writings in the course of preparing her manuscripts for publication. The practice of self-censorship pervades Woolf’s work of the thirties, the decade in which she was engaged in her most forceful critique of militarism, capitalism, fascism, nationalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. The holograph and typescript fragments of Three Guineas , the three scrapbooks in which she collected source material for that work, and the photographs that appear in its earliest published versions demonstrate Woolf’s extensive engagement with the tradition of feminist pacifism. Rather than a set of beliefs that developed only in response to the escalating political crises of the thirties, I suggest Woolf’s feminist pacifism to have been a persistent, evolving ethos that informed and propelled nearly all of her writing.;Chapter One situates the work’s interlocking composition, publication, and reception histories within their historical and cultural backgrounds, revealing how thoroughly each of these aspects was saturated by the pacifist discourse of the interwar period, and how thoroughly the work itself has permeated pacifist discourse in the seventy years since its publication. Chapter Two establishes a rationale for the construction of a posteclectic edition of Three Guineas and proposes several models capable of displaying the work’s varied pre-publication states and the pacifist content contained therein. In Chapter Three, I suggest that Three Guineas is best understood as part of Woolf’s ongoing cultural dialogue with feminist pacifists, past and present; with Britain’s patriarchal peace movement; and with those British institutions of Church and State that she regarded as implicit in the perpetuation of war. Given the importance of the Three Guineas photographs within this dialogue, Chapter Four reconstructs the historical and cultural significance of each |
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”My country is the whole world”: ”Three Guineas” and the culture of pacifist dissent. $49.99 Virginia Woolf, like many women writers, is notorious for having purged the most subversive political content from her writings in the course of preparing her manuscripts for publication. The practice of self-censorship pervades Woolf’s work of the thirties, the decade in which she was engaged in her most forceful critique of militarism, capitalism, fascism, nationalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. The holograph and typescript fragments of Three Guineas , the three scrapbooks in which she collected source material for that work, and the photographs that appear in its earliest published versions demonstrate Woolf’s extensive engagement with the tradition of feminist pacifism. Rather than a set of beliefs that developed only in response to the escalating political crises of the thirties, I suggest Woolf’s feminist pacifism to have been a persistent, evolving ethos that informed and propelled nearly all of her writing.;Chapter One situates the work’s interlocking composition, publication, and reception histories within their historical and cultural backgrounds, revealing how thoroughly each of these aspects was saturated by the pacifist discourse of the interwar period, and how thoroughly the work itself has permeated pacifist discourse in the seventy years since its publication. Chapter Two establishes a rationale for the construction of a posteclectic edition of Three Guineas and proposes several models capable of displaying the work’s varied pre-publication states and the pacifist content contained therein. In Chapter Three, I suggest that Three Guineas is best understood as part of Woolf’s ongoing cultural dialogue with feminist pacifists, past and present; with Britain’s patriarchal peace movement; and with those British institutions of Church and State that she regarded as implicit in the perpetuation of war. Given the importance of the Three Guineas photographs within this dialogue, Chapter Four reconstructs the historical and cultural significance of each |
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”Opium pushing and Bible smuggling”: Religion and the cultural politics of British imperialist ambition in China. $49.99 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, British missionaries disrupted the century-old tea-trade triangle by their insistence on penetrating the closed Chinese empire. Their cultural knowledge made these missionaries attractive potential allies for merchants while also giving accounts of their mission a literary appeal. Although missionary writing was intended for specifically Evangelical audiences, the influence of these works extended to popular culture and into the crafting of foreign policy for the Opium War as the political situation in China intensified due to opium trafficking.;The first chapter traces the scholarly traditions on mission and imperialism, and the missionary movement in China. It also shows that two differing perspectives on mission and empire derive from competing subcultures in early-nineteenth-century Britain: middle-class popular culture and the growing Evangelical subculture. The second chapter adapts the notions of “imagined communities” and an “imperial archive” for considering ways in which Evangelicals created literature—an “Evangelical Archive”—that formulated and maintained their conceptual unity both at home and with their missionaries and converts abroad. Aimed Benjamin Fischer at recruiting missionaries, encouraging believers, providing ethnology, and garnering support, mission narratives first emerged from the difficult mission context of China. The third chapter contrasts Evangelical representations of China with those by Thomas DeQuincey, Jesuit missionaries, and travel writers. Encoding spiritual terms for both spiritual and material subjects of attention, mission narratives assisted in coloring China as dark and depraved in opposition to Christianity’s enlightening brightness. The fourth chapter examines the work of Charles Gutzlaff, Journal of Three Voyages, and demonstrates a shift in the Evangelical approach to both British culture and foreign peoples, and thus a refiguring of the relationship between mission |
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”Opium pushing and Bible smuggling”: Religion and the cultural politics of British imperialist ambition in China. $49.99 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, British missionaries disrupted the century-old tea-trade triangle by their insistence on penetrating the closed Chinese empire. Their cultural knowledge made these missionaries attractive potential allies for merchants while also giving accounts of their mission a literary appeal. Although missionary writing was intended for specifically Evangelical audiences, the influence of these works extended to popular culture and into the crafting of foreign policy for the Opium War as the political situation in China intensified due to opium trafficking.;The first chapter traces the scholarly traditions on mission and imperialism, and the missionary movement in China. It also shows that two differing perspectives on mission and empire derive from competing subcultures in early-nineteenth-century Britain: middle-class popular culture and the growing Evangelical subculture. The second chapter adapts the notions of “imagined communities” and an “imperial archive” for considering ways in which Evangelicals created literature—an “Evangelical Archive”—that formulated and maintained their conceptual unity both at home and with their missionaries and converts abroad. Aimed Benjamin Fischer at recruiting missionaries, encouraging believers, providing ethnology, and garnering support, mission narratives first emerged from the difficult mission context of China. The third chapter contrasts Evangelical representations of China with those by Thomas DeQuincey, Jesuit missionaries, and travel writers. Encoding spiritual terms for both spiritual and material subjects of attention, mission narratives assisted in coloring China as dark and depraved in opposition to Christianity’s enlightening brightness. The fourth chapter examines the work of Charles Gutzlaff, Journal of Three Voyages, and demonstrates a shift in the Evangelical approach to both British culture and foreign peoples, and thus a refiguring of the relationship between mission |
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”Tell It to Us Easy” and Other Stories: A Complete Short Fiction Anthology of African American Women Writers in Opportunity Magazine (1923-1948) $25 Judith Musser,Paperback – Reprint, English-language edition,Pub by McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers |
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”The Saturday”: Popular narrative, identity, and cultural imaginary in literary journals of early republican Shanghai. $49.99 This dissertation presents a systematic study of The Saturday (Libailiu, 1914–1916, 1921–1923) as a combination of both literary creation and cultural production in 20 th century Shanghai, by analyzing popular narrative in The Saturday, its readership, and its culture. The Saturday was one of the most successful and best-selling popular literary journals in Shanghai in the 1910′s and 1920′s. Released on Saturday mornings, it was China’s first weekly commercial magazine, promoting reading fiction to be consumed during weekend leisure time. The Saturday provides a unique and compelling case study of the intricate process of production, dissemination, and consumption of literature, and of popular media’s participation in the construction of cultural meaning. Focusing on The Saturday and the less-studied Saturday group, I attempt to demonstrate the instrumental role played by popular magazines in the configuration of urban modernity, cultural identity, and literary public sphere in early Republican Shanghai.;The popular narrative and cultural imaginary in The Saturday articulated the quest for modernization, one that emphasized sentiment, everyday experience, a middle-class way of life, economic wealth, moral and social responsibilities, strengthening of the nation, and reinvention of cultural tradition. I explore how ideas and images of modernity were integrated, moderated, and disseminated through popular print media in Republican China. In this process the Saturday group played a multi-functional role of editors, writers, publishers, translators, and readers, and served as a kind of mediator between elite intellectuals and common people, high ideals and cultural practice, and cultural producers and consumers. My reading of The Saturday stories also suggests that popular magazines and the new practice of reading and writing provided a basis to construct a cultural identity among its urban audience. Channeling the cultural expression of social values and |
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”What helps us improve?”: Sixteen high school seniors’ perceptions of their growth as writers. $49.99 Writing plays an important role in academic learning, career success, and personal enlightenment. However, because of the complex nature of writing and the competing demands on English teachers’ time and attention, teaching writing is no easy task. And while a growing body of research has explored various methods for teaching writing, few studies have examined effective writing instruction from the student’s perspective. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to ascertain what sixteen high school seniors deemed beneficial in their development as writers. During in-depth interviews, I invited participants to peruse their high school writing portfolios and discuss how their various writing experiences affected their writing skills. The students identified four primary factors in their growth as writers: (1) audience feedback, which included teacher comments, peer feedback, teacher-student conferences, and parental/external review; (2) experience with the writing process, which included experience in general, experience with grammar in context, and experience with self-analysis; (3) reading, which included reading in general and reading model texts; and (4) motivation to write, which included student interest, freedom of choice, connections between writing and other art forms, and self-efficacy for writing. |
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”What helps us improve?”: Sixteen high school seniors’ perceptions of their growth as writers. $49.99 Writing plays an important role in academic learning, career success, and personal enlightenment. However, because of the complex nature of writing and the competing demands on English teachers’ time and attention, teaching writing is no easy task. And while a growing body of research has explored various methods for teaching writing, few studies have examined effective writing instruction from the student’s perspective. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to ascertain what sixteen high school seniors deemed beneficial in their development as writers. During in-depth interviews, I invited participants to peruse their high school writing portfolios and discuss how their various writing experiences affected their writing skills. The students identified four primary factors in their growth as writers: (1) audience feedback, which included teacher comments, peer feedback, teacher-student conferences, and parental/external review; (2) experience with the writing process, which included experience in general, experience with grammar in context, and experience with self-analysis; (3) reading, which included reading in general and reading model texts; and (4) motivation to write, which included student interest, freedom of choice, connections between writing and other art forms, and self-efficacy for writing. |
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‘A Dream of Stone’: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture $59.45 With democratization of fame in the wake of the French Revolution, writers enjoyed ever greater celebrity status. But in nineteenth-century France, the availability and perceived impermanence of such renown cheapened it, and prompted longing for enduring fame, exemplified by monuments_commemorative sculptural or architectural works, helping a nation in flux define itself, its past, and anticipated future. Within this cultural climate, there evolved an ideal of great writers and their work as immortal that envisioned literary greatness through the metaphor of monuments and monumentality. In reconstructing such a pervasive ‘dream of stone,’ this interdisciplinary study draws upon wide-ranging evidence, from journalism to poetry, caricature to statuary. Focusing on the lives, work, and fame of Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, it uncovers the salient features, and traces the rise and fall of this monumentalizing vision of literary greatness, largely forgotten today, yet so central to nineteenth-century French culture. Illustrated. |
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‘A severe and thankless task’: Managing the middle classes in nineteenth-century U.S. domestic fiction. $49.99 At its core, this study expands the socio-cultural work of literary in examining intra-class tensions during the Gilded Age, while also adding to the current work on women writers, domestic fiction, food studies, and feminist literary criticism. The domestic and household fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine Owen, Frances E.W. Harper, and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton resist the prevailing critical assumption that the "middle class" had a unified identity. Instead these texts depict middle classes riddled by profound insecurities. Due to these intra-class tensions, I do not use the term middle class and instead favor the more accurate description of middle classes. These tensions are particularly evident when the authors negotiate issues of social consequence, such as mistress-servant labor relations and evolving conceptions of ethnicity and race, but also when they write about daily events, such as cooking meals, performing the duties of a hostess and housewife, and serving tea in the parlor. These texts additionally disclose how much the middle classes depend on women’s unremunerated work within the home, community, and nation in forms ranging from mothering, to policing of appropriate class behavior, to assimilating an immigrant servant workforce in US customs. These concerns illustrate an intense authorial, editorial, and readerly engagement with the social and political climate of the day, while also offering readers a way to negotiate social change and to politicize their domestic knowledge. The works I discuss include Stowe’s House and Home Papers (1865), Pink and White Tyranny (1871), My Wife and I (1872), and We and Our Neighbors (1875); Owen’s Ten Dollars Enough (1887), Molly Bishop’s Family (1888), and Gentle Breadwinners (1888); Harper’s Sowing and Reaping (1876-77), Trial and Triumph (1888-89), and Iola Leroy (1892); and Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), and The Squatter and the Don (1885). |
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‘A severe and thankless task’: Managing the middle classes in nineteenth-century U.S. domestic fiction. $49.99 At its core, this study expands the socio-cultural work of literary in examining intra-class tensions during the Gilded Age, while also adding to the current work on women writers, domestic fiction, food studies, and feminist literary criticism. The domestic and household fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine Owen, Frances E.W. Harper, and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton resist the prevailing critical assumption that the "middle class" had a unified identity. Instead these texts depict middle classes riddled by profound insecurities. Due to these intra-class tensions, I do not use the term middle class and instead favor the more accurate description of middle classes. These tensions are particularly evident when the authors negotiate issues of social consequence, such as mistress-servant labor relations and evolving conceptions of ethnicity and race, but also when they write about daily events, such as cooking meals, performing the duties of a hostess and housewife, and serving tea in the parlor. These texts additionally disclose how much the middle classes depend on women’s unremunerated work within the home, community, and nation in forms ranging from mothering, to policing of appropriate class behavior, to assimilating an immigrant servant workforce in US customs. These concerns illustrate an intense authorial, editorial, and readerly engagement with the social and political climate of the day, while also offering readers a way to negotiate social change and to politicize their domestic knowledge. The works I discuss include Stowe’s House and Home Papers (1865), Pink and White Tyranny (1871), My Wife and I (1872), and We and Our Neighbors (1875); Owen’s Ten Dollars Enough (1887), Molly Bishop’s Family (1888), and Gentle Breadwinners (1888); Harper’s Sowing and Reaping (1876-77), Trial and Triumph (1888-89), and Iola Leroy (1892); and Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), and The Squatter and the Don (1885). |
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‘It will be social’: Black women writers and the postwar era 1945–1960. $49.99 This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women’s fiction during the postwar era (1945–60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers’ political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists. |
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‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siecle $125 Marion Thain recounts the development of this fascinating poetic persona, created by two female writers. |
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‘Nuff Said $20.59 Marvel President Bill Jemas and Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada hatched a test for the Mighty Marvel Maestros: Since you’re the best artists and writers in the biz, we challenge you to tell a story using visuals only. |
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‘Sister Outsiders’ $147.03 Sister outsiders draws attention to a neglected corpus of writing in South African literary criticism. The focus is on the exclusion of Indian women”s writings in South Africa, which must be seen as a dimension of the larger exclusion of women”s writings, white and black, from South African literature in general. The book provides an historical account of the events that contributed to the marginalisation of black literature – specifically Indian women”s literature – amongst other things, the institutionalisation of English Studies which affected the reading and reception of texts written by Indian women, and the contstruction of an indigenous English literary tradition that did not include black writers as much as it did white writers of English descent, writing about South African experiences. |
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‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller $32.1 The history of Irish Travellers is not analogous to that of the ‘tinker’, a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by sixteenth-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland. By the Revival, the tinker represented bohemian, pre-Celtic aboriginality, functioning as the cultural nationalist counter to the Victorian Gypsy mania. Long misunderstood as a portrayal of actual Travellers, J.M. Synge’s influential The Tinker’s Wedding was pivotal to this ‘Irishing’ of the tinker, even as it acknowledged that figure’s cosmopolitan textual roots. Synge’s empathetic depiction is closely examined, as are the many subsequent representations that looked to him as a model to subvert or emulate. In contrast to their Revival-era romanticization, post-independence writing portrayed tinkers as alien interlopers, while contemporaneous Unionists labeled them a contaminant from the hostile South. However, after Travellers politicized in the 1960s, more even-handed depictions heralded a querying of the ‘tinker’ fantasy that has shaped contemporary screen and literary representations of Travellers and has prompted Traveller writers to transubstantiate Otherness into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. Though its Irish equivalent has oscillated between idealization and demonization, US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as lovable ‘white trash’ rogue. This process is informed by the mythology of a population with whom Travelers are allied in the white American imagination, the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots). In short, the ‘tinker’ is much more central to Irish, Northern Irish and even Irish-American identity than is currently recognised. |
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‘True Jersey Blues’: The Civil War Letters of Lucien A. Voorhees and William McKenzie Thompson $75 This book tells the story of two Civil War soldiers from Hunterdon County serving with the Army of the Potomac through letters written to hometown newspapers. Their vivid accounts of life on the march, fierce firefights, and everyday occupations convey a true sense of the Civil War as experienced by the men enlisted to fight. The letters cover the period from the muster of the 15th Regiment at Flemington (August 1862) through the combat deaths of both writers at Spotsylvania (May 1864). |
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‘Turnovers’ from the Globe; Essays and Sketches by the Best Writers of the Day $23.28 W. Marc Jones,Paperback, English-language edition,Pub by Rarebooksclub.com |
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(Post)national ImagiNation of Algeria: Identity politics and practice in Algerian Francophone literature. $49.99 This thesis examines the role of the French language in contemporary Algerian literature. Traditionally, scholars have seen the use of French in Algeria as a residual artifact of French rule, or as an attempt to appropriate the language and subvert the colonial power. Neither of these explanations, however, can account for the increased use of French in Algerian literature following the fall of the Algerian colony in 1962 and the subsequent policy of Arabization. This thesis proposes a new explanation for this increase: that French has become the language with which Algerian writers comment upon their own country, and in so doing, create national narratives. The foreignness of the French language has allowed Algerian writers to react to the homogenous nation-building discourse initially imposed by the Algerian government, and to assert a long-suppressed linguistic and ethno-cultural diversity. In reconsidering Francophone Algerian literature as a medium for national introspection, this dissertation addresses how this literature can be considered outside of a colonized discourse and how it renegotiates the cultural conception of Algerianness. The beginning of this thesis studies subversions of the nationalist discourse written shortly after Algeria's independence. A close examination of Rachid Mimouni's Le Printemps n'en sera que plus beau and Yamina Mechakra's La Grotte eclatee demonstrate this in literature written within Algeria, while a study of works published in France – notably, Tahar Djaout's Les Chercheurs d'os and Rachid Mimouni's Le Fleuve detourne – evinces a more direct critique. The sense in which evolving national narratives exclude the sizable Algerian Berber minority is seen in Mouloud Mammeri's La traversee. Following the Algerian civil war, a previously suppressed Algerian female voice also becomes apparent; this is studied in Assia Djebar's Les nuits de Strasbourg and Malika Mokeddem's |