For me, the name Dante conjured up two images. The first was the epic depictions of Hell from Dante's Inferno, with people burning for their sins. The second image was a sexual depiction. I don't know where it came from, but as far back as I can remember, I had always associated the name Dante with a beautiful and sexy man. I'd imagined a dark-haired, dark-eyed, gorgeous lothario, the type who could capture a woman's heart with just one look. Dante was the Fabio of my generation, the heartthrob that got women's hearts beating fast, made us want this man to rip our clothes off and to throw us onto the bed. Little did I know that the Dante that walked into my life was very different from the one I'd imagined. Oh, he was dark-haired, dark-eyed, gorgeous, even a lothario ... just ... he wasn't a man. He was a fifteen-year-old boy who was going to send me to the Hell his namesake had written about. And I was his teacher.

SHAW 16 contains twenty-nine unpublished pieces by Shaw written between 1877 and 1950. The most significant is a ten-page draft synopsis of Man and Superman (the original manuscript draft of the play has been lost) in a contemplated five-act version, providing scholars with a hitherto unavailable ur-text. Equally important for the biographical and artistic insights they offer are the early literary efforts found in Shaw's first opus notebook, including an extended narrative-verse fragment of 1877 set in Dublin; a polemic (his first) on oakum picking and prison conditions; a criticism of organists and orchestral conductors; and an attempted evaluation of contemporary arts and letters in 1878. We find Shaw, through the persona of a female narrator, creating in his own image a fictional memoir of the young Hector Berlioz; offering an ironic vindication of housebreakers (in anticipation of Heartbreak House); exploring the seamy side of the prizefight ring; examining "exhausted" genres of Victorian art in 1880; defining the "true signification of the term Gentleman"; lecturing on Socialism and the family and on realism as the goal of fiction; and penetratingly considering the future of marriage in a rejected book review, one of four included in the volume. The dimensions of Shaw's political views may be examined through nearly a dozen commentaries on politics and on war and peace, ranging from the Boer War (an 1899 draft letter to the press, "Why Not Abolish the Soldier?") and 1903 municipal elections to U.S. Liberty Loans, the Italo-Abyssinian War, "how to talk intelligently" about the Second World War, and the implications of the hydrogen bomb in the nuclear age. For good measure, the volume concludes with two brief playlets, previously unrecorded. The editors have arranged these pieces individually or grouped by theme and genre as near to chronological order as possible, and the reader is brought closer to the original manuscripts by the retention of Shaw's stylistic and spelling inconsistencies, and by transliteration of the shorthand notations he frequently inserted between lines or in the margins. Each text is supplemented by an editorial note providing its provenance and a detailed physical description of the manuscript.

The English language in the Renaissance was in many ways a collection of competing Englishes. Blank investigates the representation of alternative vernaculars in both linguistic and literary works of the time.

Teaching of English in India has been traditionally grammar based. The teacher teaches a good deal of grammar; assigns exercises in class or as homework and makes a lot of corrections. Such painstaking efforts on the part of the teacher are, of course, helpful in learning the language but does not much help the student to use the language in day-to-day conversation. Leaving aside the traditional method of dealing with grammar as an isolated subject, the present book offers a specific course in spoken English that focuses on the language of interaction and social exchanges. Its main emphasis is on developing communicative ability of the learner.

e-Books for the first semester of all undergraduate courses in the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, following the syllabus in accordance with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, including skill enhancement courses, have been published by Thakur Publication Pvt. Ltd.

Black-Arab political and cultural solidarity has had a long and rich history in the United States. That alliance is once again exerting a powerful influence on American society as Black American and Arab American activists and cultural workers are joining forces in formations like the Movement for Black Lives and Black for Palestine to address social justice issues. In Breaking Broken English, Hartman explores the historical and current manifestations of this relationship through language and literature, with a specific focus on Arab American literary works that use the English language creatively to put into practice many of the theories and ideas advanced by Black American thinkers. Breaking Broken English shows how language is the location where literary and poetic beauty meet the political in creative work. Hartman draws out thematic connections between Arabs/Arab Americans and Black Americans around politics and culture and also highlights the many artistic ways these links are built. She shows how political and cultural ideas of solidarity are written in creative texts and emphasizes their potential to mobilize social justice activists in the United States and abroad in the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine.