Product Description

From the author team of the discipline's most widely used literature anthology, this accessible and instructive guide introduces students to the language of literary study. Featuring an engaging and accessible writing style, this supplemental reference manual for the introductory student has over 400 entries and serves to demystify literature and the terms, techniques, and analysis tools that literary scholars use. NEW TO THIS EDITION: Over 25 additional entries, covering more contemporary terms (blogging, etc). Selected illustrations throughout.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #768141 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Back Cover

“We assume that appreciation begins in delighted attention to words on a page.”

­­­­­­­­­_____ X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia

This simple statement is the guiding principle behind the most popular literature text of its kind.  The authors, with Mark Bauerlein, have now applied that principle to the seemingly complex world of literary terms.

Simple, clear and concise, this little handbook is one of the most practical study tools you can lay your hands on.

About the Author

X.J. Kennedy, after graduation from Seton Hall and Columbia, became a journalist second class in the Navy ("Actually, I was pretty eighth class"). His poems, some published in the New Yorker, were first collected in Nude Descending a Staircase (1961). Since then he has written five more collections, several widely adopted literature and writing textbooks, and seventeen books for children, including two novels. He has taught at Michigan, North Carolina (Greensboro), California (Irvine), Wellesley, Tufts, and Leeds. Cited in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and reprinted in some 200 anthologies, his verse has brought him a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lamont Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an award from the American Academy for Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English. He now lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Dorothy have collaborated on four books and five children.

Dana Gioia is a poet, critic, and teacher. Born in Los Angeles, he attended Stanford and Harvard before taking a detour into business. ("Not many poets have a Stanford M.B.A., thank goodness!") After years of writing and reading late in the evenings after work, he quit a vice presidency to write and teach. He has published three collections of poetry: Daily Horoscope (1986); The Gods of Winter (1991); Interrogations at Noon (2001), winner of the 2001 American Book Award; an opera libretto, Nosferatu (2002); several anthologies; and an influential study of poetry’s place in contemporary America, Can Poetry Matter? (1992). Gioia has taught at Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan (Connecticut), Mercer, and Colorado College. He is also the co-founder of the summer poetry conference at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and a frequent commentator on literature for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He currently lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife, Mary, two sons, and an ever growing number of cats.

(The surname Gioia is pronounced JOY-A. As some of you may have already guessed, gioia is the Italian word for joy.)

Customer Reviews

A good choice
This is exactly the right book for someone like me, who wants a lively, expert, up-to-date and, within its relatively brief compass, a reasonably comprehensive guide to terms in language, literary criticism and theory, but one that is not too technical, not clogged with jargon. I like the clarity and conciseness, and the helpful cross-referencing which allows one to put this definition or that in a wider context. As the authors say, there are various longer books to which one can turn for treatment in still greater depth; but for the intelligent, enquiring high school or university student, the merits of this little compendium will not soon be exhausted.