Reading and Writing from Literature

Reading and Writing from Literature is ideal for instructors who wish to support students with significant writing instruction accompanied by a robust literary anthology that includes fiction, poetry, drama, and essays. Using an approachable, conversational tone, this thematic anthology and writing text emphasizes intertextuality--the way in which texts, including the student's own writing, grow out of other texts. Thirteen chapters of guidance on writing about literature (Parts I-III) cover such topics as planning, drafting, and revising essays on literature, research and documentation in a literature-based context, writing argumentative literary essays, and creating a writing portfolio. Part IV introduces students to the genres--short stories, poems, plays, and essays. Part V provides a thorough overview of figurative language. Part VI, the text's thematic anthology, is organized around themes of particular interest to students: Gender and Relationships, Families, Experience and Identity, Individual and Society, People and Cultures in Conflict and Change, and Work and the Quality of Life. It contains 45 new poems, essays/nonfiction writing, and short stories, with an emphasis on the contemporary. This edition features a stronger representation of international and multicultural authors, including such writers as Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Derek Walcott, Yusef Komunyaka, Sei Shonagon, and Allan Gurganus.