Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama

X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia

Pearson Longman, 2005 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 2324 pages

Poets in their own right, editors X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia bring personal warmth and a human perspective to this comprehensive anthology. "Literature" presents readable discussions of the literary devices, illustrated by engaging works, supported by useful writing tips, and followed by seven chapters devoted to writing that have been thoroughly updated to reflect MLA's latest guidelines. Conversations with Amy Tan, Kay Ryan (the 2008 poet laureate), and David Ives, conducted by Dana Gioia, offer readers an insider's look into the importance of reading to three contemporary writers. A Latin American Writers casebook is new to Fiction and collects some of the finest authors from the region including Octavia Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Ines Arendondo. A casebook on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is now featured as part of the Three Stories In-depth chapter. Many new writers have been added including Naguib Mafouz, Virginia Woolf, Sherman Alexie, Cynthia Ozick, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Anne Deavere Smith.

Contents

• Preface: xlv
• Glossary of Literary Terms: xlvii
• About the Authors: lxi

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.)

Bibliographic information

• Title: Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama; Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, Dana Gioia
• Authors: X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia
• Editor: X. J. Kennedy
• Compiled by: X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia
• Edition: 9, illustrated
• Publisher: Pearson Longman, 2005
• ISBN: 0321245512, 9780321245519
• Length: 2324 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Rhetoric; Literary Criticism / General