Looks at American authors from Washington Irving to John Updike and provides brief biographical sketches, excerpts and summaries of major works, and explanations of major literary movements

From Plato to Freud to ecocriticism, the book illustrates dozens of stimulating-and sometimes notoriously complex-perspectives for approaching literature and film. The book offers authoritative, clear, and easy-to-follow explanations of theories that range from established classics to the controversies of current theory. Each chapter offers a conversational, step-by-step explanation of a single theory, critic, or issue, accompanied by concrete examples for applying the concepts and engaging suggestions for related literary readings. Following a section on the foundations of literary theory, the book is organized thematically, with an eye to the best way to develop a real, working understanding of the various theories. Cross-references are particularly important, since it's through the interaction of examples that readers most effectively advance from basic topics and arguments to some of the more specialized and complicated issues. Each chapter is designed to tell a complete story, yet also to reach out to other chapters for development and debate. Literary theorists are hardly unified in their views, and this book reflects the various traditions, agreements, influences, and squabbles that are a part of the field. Special features include hundreds of references to and quotations from novels, stories, plays, poems, movies, and other media. Online resources could also include video and music clips, as well as high-quality examples of visual art mentioned in the book. The book also includes periodic "running" references to selected key titles (such as Frankenstein) in order to illustrate the effect of different theories on a single work.

A fifty percent revision of a popular Complete Idiot's Guide that now, more than ever, offers readers a thorough, creative writing class in a book, with Dr. Laurie Rozakis as their teacher. The book is refocused to more of an academic approach. Readers can begin to unlock their creativity from the first page, with fabulous exercises that help them explore their talents and experiment with different genres and forms of writing, including: • •Short stories •Narrative nonfiction •Memoirs •Magazine articles •Poetry •Drama •Blogging and freewriting

Covers all elements of effective and grammatically-correct writing, including electronic formats, for any type of situation from research papers to business memos.

Read between the lines--and get more information on the greatest works in the English canon; political criticism; the history of drama; character and plot in drama and fiction; Shakespeare and his contemporaries; Renaissance literature; the Romantic and Victorian periods; the basics of poetry; magical realism and other highlights of the postmodern period; the greatest words ever written by Wordsworth, Byron, and other notable poets.

Presents the principles of Spanish vocabulary, grammar, and usage for immediate use, along with a Spanish/English-English/Spanish dictionary, a guide to pronunciation, cultural information, useful phrases, and exercises.