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Welcome to the Literature Research Guide!
The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry's life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband--her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life--a very American life through self-reinvention--uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.
Widely regarded as one of America's great authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald led a life of drama and extravagance that often overshadowed his writing career. This book refocuses attention on how Fitzgerald viewed and approached the business of writing. Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III explores the writer's professional life through personal letters, manuscripts, his business ledger, editions of his novels, and even a "seven-year plan." In assessing these diverse materials, West reveals fascinating details about what led Fitzgerald to follow authorship as a calling, why he took on certain projects, how he managed his finances, and what influenced his writing style. Connecting Fitzgerald's career to his literary texts, West also provides new information on the development and publication history of some of Fitzgerald's most important works, such as The Great Gatsby and Jacob's Ladder. Throughout, West pays close attention to the delicate balance in Fitzgerald's career between money and literary respectability, commerce and art. A keen, engaging, and intimate look at Fitzgerald's day-to-day work of writing for a living, Business Is Good is a must-have for anyone who wants a better understanding of this American literary giant.
CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant? Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his pedestal to unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard asks us neither to idealize nor bury Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. In inviting new perspectives and interpretations, we may yet prolong and enrich his extraordinary legacy.
While his memory languished under Nazi censorship, Franz Kafka covertly circulated through occupied France and soon emerged as a cultural icon, read by the most influential intellectuals of the time as a prophet of the rampant bureaucracy, totalitarian oppression, and absurdity that branded the twentieth century. In tracing the history of Kafka's reception in postwar France, John T. Hamilton explores how the work of a German-Jewish writer from Prague became a modern classic capable of addressing universal themes of the human condition. Hamilton also considers how Kafka's unique literary corpus came to stimulate reflection in diverse movements, critical approaches, and philosophical schools, from surrealism and existentialism through psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and structuralism to Marxism, deconstruction, and feminism. The story of Kafka's afterlife in Paris thus furnishes a key chapter in the unfolding of French theory, which continues to guide how we read literature and understand its relationship to the world.
Ovid's Tragic Heroines expands our understanding of Ovid's incorporation of Greek generic codes and the tragic heroines, Phaedra and Medea, while offering a new perspective on the Roman poet's persistent interest in these two characters and their paradigms. Ovid presents these two Attic tragic heroines as symbols of different passions that are defined by the specific combination of their gender and generic provenance. Their failure to be understood and their subsequent punishment are constructed as the result of their female "nature," and are generically marked as "tragic." Ovid's masculine poetic voice, by contrast, is given free rein to oscillate and play with poetic possibilities. Jessica A. Westerhold focuses on select passages from the poems Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses. Building on existing scholarship, she analyzes the dynamic nature of generic categories and codes in Ovid's poetry, especially the interplay of elegy and epic. Further, her analysis of Ovid's reception applies the idea of the abject to elucidate Ovid's process of constructing gender and genre in his poetry. Ovid's Tragic Heroines incorporates established theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles to understand the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions Ovid's poetry creates. The resulting analysis reveals how Ovid's Phaedras and Medeas offer alternatives both to traditional gender roles and to material appropriate to a poem's genre, ultimately using the tragic code to introduce a new perspective to epic and elegy.
Layer by layer, talking through time itself, these tales of the ancient gods and goddesses make up the bedrock of the mythological landscapes of these islands. Through the ages this has been the meeting place of successive cultures, each bringing their own stories to glorify those beings with super human powers. Despite their immortality, these divinities are nevertheless vulnerable, depending on the voices and memories of people to celebrate their wondrous exploits. Between these covers you will meet the divinities once revered throughout Britain and Ireland, not through lists in some dusty encyclopedia, but through the stories of their deeds, famous and infamous in equal part. The reader will enjoy the tales themselves and in the unfolding insights they bring to the different cultures that they represent.
Lady Augusta Gregory's collection and translation of Irish folk legends brings, as Yeats observed, 'Ireland's gift of imagination to the world'.Following on from the bestselling Irish Myths and Legends: Gods and Fighting Men, this second volume, originally titled Cuchulain of Muirthemne, tells of the brave exploits of Ireland's answer to Achilles, the fearless Cuchulain and the Red Branch of Ulster, as well as the overpowering love of his wife Emer.Forming part of the bedrock of Gaelic legend, and translated faithfully from the idiom of Irish oral storytellers, this new volume is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Gaelic culture.
The Kathasaritsagara is a combination of simultaneously innocent and sophisticated folk stories bringing forth both common sense and highly sophisticated Sanskrit writing. It paints a vivid picture of a most particular part of India at one moment in history, and yet it tells stories that are the Indian variants - often the Indian sources - of stories told around the world. Arisha Sattar's translations bring these stories to life in a modern way, while retaining their ancient meanings.
Enchanting tales of the gods, kings, and monsters that populated the Anglo-Saxon world. An atmospheric collection of 30 folk tales exploring stories of cosmology, monsters, conflicts and courtship from the Seven Kingdoms to Middle Earth. This is an entertaining portal into a world overflowing with mythology, magic and all manner of beguiling creatures, which has inspired everything from the Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones. The book is divided into 3 parts: Scop is a set of stories told by the Anglo-Saxon storyteller Scop, from the creation to the destruction of the world. It explores what remains of the gods and monsters of the Anglo-Saxon cosmology Wreccan is pagan stories exploring self-discovery and development through exile. Variations of these tales would have told by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, including Sigemund's rebellion and the trials of Beowulf. Bretwalda stories revolve around Bretwalda the chief Anglo-Saxon king who ruled over the majority of the Seven Kingdoms. These stories reflect a period when both the old gods and Christianity existed simultaneously. Remarkable illustrations by Jesus Sotes breath new life into these tales of the past.
Research assistance - help finding sources, evaluating sources
Online workshops for citing and plagiarism are held throughout the semester. To request a citing workshop, please email library@rcbc.edu