Ready-to-use, high interest stories with mini-lessons and activities that help students understand literary elements and use them effectively in their writing.

Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, "humanity" is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices— the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting— Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view.

In this text for teachers, the authors explain how to teach what really matters about character, setting, point of view, and theme.

This book has engaging lessons, graphic organizers, and hand-on activities that help students respond to what they read and deepen comprehension.

Elements of Literature: Third Canadian Edition provides Canadian students with an unmatched collection of short fiction, poetry, and drama. Designed to help students develop a coherent, contemporary appreciation of literature, the anthology provides a rich array of selections including worksby Canadian, British, and American authors, as well as writers of other nationalities. The selection of poetry ranges from Chaucer to contemporary poets, while the drama section offers examples of tragedy and comedy from classical times to the present.

Centered around Common Core State Standards, Common Core: Elements of Literature is designed to help students understand such complex elements of literature as irony and symbolism. Practice pages, student charts, graphic organizers, research challenges, discussion starters, writing prompts, games, group activities, and recommended reading lists enable students to practice: Pinpointing character, setting, plot, and theme; uncovering common symbols in fiction; detecting similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech; spotting verbal, situational, and dramatic irony; and recognizing allegory, parody, and satire. Mark Twain Media Publishing Company specializes in providing captivating, supplemental books and decorative resources to complement middle- and upper-grade classrooms. Designed by leading educators, the product line covers a range of subjects including mathematics, sciences, language arts, social studies, history, government, fine arts, and character. Mark Twain Media also provides innovative classroom solutions for bulletin boards and interactive whiteboards. Since 1977, Mark Twain Media has remained a reliable source for a wide variety of engaging classroom resources.