Gale Researcher Guide for: Seamus Heaney: From Pastoral to Politics and Beyond is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Offers an overview of American environmental literature across genres and time periods, introducing readers to a range of ecocritical methodologies.

One of the greatest challenges for English language arts teachers today is the call to engage students in more complex texts. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literary criticism a powerful tool for helping students tackle challenging literary texts. Tim breaks down the dense language of critical theory into clear, lively, and thorough explanations of many schools of critical thought---reader response, biographical, historical, psychological, archetypal, genre based, moral, philosophical, feminist, political, formalist, and postmodern. Doing Literary Criticism gives each theory its own chapter with a brief, teacher-friendly overview and a history of the approach, along with an in-depth discussion of its benefits and limitations. Each chapter also includes ideas for classroom practices and activities. Using stories from his own English classes--from alternative programs to advance placement and everything in between--Tim provides a wealth of specific classroom-tested suggestions for discussion, essay and research paper topics, recommended texts, exam questions, and more. The accompanying CD offers abbreviated overviews of each theory (designed to be used as classroom handouts, examples of student work, collections of quotes to stimulate discussion and writing, an extended history of women writers, and much more. Ultimately, Doing Literary Criticism offers teachers a rich set of materials and tools to help their students become more confident and able readers, writers, and critical thinkers.

The Handbook to Literary Research is a practical guide for students embarking on postgraduate work in Literary Studies. It introduces and explains research techniques, methodologies and approaches to information resources, paying careful attention to the differences between countries and institutions, and providing a range of key examples. This fully updated second edition is divided into five sections which cover: tools of the trade – a brand new chapter outlining how to make the most of literary resources textual scholarship and book history – explains key concepts and variations in editing, publishing and bibliography issues and approaches in literary research – presents a critical overview of theoretical approaches essential to literary studies the dissertation – demonstrates how to approach, plan and write this important research exercise glossary – provides comprehensive explanations of key terms, and a checklist of resources. Packed with useful tips and exercises and written by scholars with extensive experience as teachers and researchers in the field, this volume is the ideal Handbook for those beginning postgraduate research in literature.

This collection of essays grew out of the "Reading Stephen King Conference" held at the University of Maine in 1996. Stephen King's books have become a lightning rod for the tensions around issues of including "mass market" popular literature in middle and high school English classes and of who chooses what students read. King's fiction is among the most popular of "pop" literature, and among the most controversial. These essays spotlight the ways in which King's work intersects with the themes of the literary canon and its construction and maintenance, censorship in public schools, and the need for adolescent readers to be able to choose books in school reading programs. The essays and their authors are: (1) "Reading Stephen King: An Ethnography of an Event" (Brenda Miller Power); (2) "I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie" (Stephen King); (3) "King and Controversy in Classrooms: A Conversation between Teachers and Students" (Kelly Chandler and others); (4) "Of Cornflakes, Hot Dogs, Cabbages, and King" (Jeffrey D. Wilhelm); (5) "The 'Wanna Read' Workshop: Reading for Love" (Kimberly Hill Campbell); (6) "When 'IT' Comes to the Classroom" (Ruth Shagoury Hubbard); (7) "If Students Own Their Learning, What Do Teachers Do?" (Curt Dudley-Marling); (8) "Disrupting Stephen King: Engaging in Alternative Reading Practices" (James Albright and Roberta F. Hammett); (9) "Because Stories Matter: Authorial Reading and the Threat of Censorship" (Michael W. Smith); (10) "Canon Construction Ahead" (Kelly Chandler); (11) "King in the Classroom" (Michael R. Collings); (12) "King's Works and the At-Risk Student: The Broad-Based Appeal of a Canon Basher" (John Skretta); (13) "Reading the Cool Stuff: Students Respond to 'Pet Sematary'" (Mark A Fabrizi); (14) "When Reading Horror Subliterature Isn't So Horrible" (Janice V. Kristo and Rosemary A. Bamford); (15) "One Book Can Hurt You...But a Thousand Never Will" (Janet S. Allen); (16) "In the Case of King: What May Follow" (Anne E. Pooler and Constance M. Perry); and (17) "Be Prepared: Developing a Censorship Policy for the Electronic Age" (Abigail C. Garthwait). Appended are a joint manifesto by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and International Reading Association (IRA) concerning intellectual freedom; an excerpt from a teacher's guide to selected horror short stories of Stephen King; and the conference program. Contains a 152-item reference list of literary works.(NKA)

Situated at the disciplinary boundary between prehistory and history, this book presents a new synthesis of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece, from the rise and fall of Mycenaean civilization to the emergence of city-states in the Archaic period. These centuries saw the growth and decline of varied political systems and the development of networks across local, regional, and Mediterranean scales. As a groundbreaking study of landscape, interaction, and sociopolitical change, Societies in Transition in Early Greece systematically bridges the divide between the Mycenaean period and the Archaic Greek world to shed new light on an often-overlooked period of world history. “This book reconfigures our understanding of early Greece on a regional level, beyond Mycenaean 'palaces' and across temporal boundaries. Alex Knodell's sophisticated arguments enable a fresh reading of the emergence of early Greek polities, revealing the microregions that put to the test overarching 'Mediterranean' models. His detailed study makes a convincing return to a comparative framework, integrating a 'small world' network and its trajectory with the larger picture of ancient complex societies.” SARAH MORRIS, Steinmetz Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture, University of California, Los Angeles “A comprehensive, thoughtful treatment of the time period before the crystallization of the ancient Greek city states.” WILLIAM A. PARKINSON, Curator and Professor, The Field Museum and University of Illinois at Chicago “An important and must-read account. The strength of this book lies in its close analysis of the important different regional characteristics and evolutionary trajectories of Greece as it transforms into the Archaic and, later, the Classical world.” DAVID B. SMALL, author Ancient Greece: Social Structure and Evolution.