The politically incorrect guide to English and American literature
By: Elizabeth Kantor
Series: Politically incorrect guide
Publisher: Regnery Pub.; Distributed to the trade by National Book Network
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Washington, DC; Lanham, MD
Language: eng
Number of pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9781596980112
Subjects: English literature; Study and teaching; History and criticism; American literature; Literatur; Political correctness
Description: Citing declining coverage of classic English and American literature in today's schools, a primer challenges popular misconceptions while introducing the works of core masters such as Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Austen.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-260) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Why This Book Is Needed; title: What They Don't Want You to Learn from English Literature (An Introduction to the Canon, from Beowulf to Flannery O'Connor); title: Old English Literature: The Age of Heroes; title: Beowulf: The hero and the poem; title: The Dream of the Rood; title: "This life on loan"; title: The Battle of Maldon; title: Medieval Literature: "Here Is God's Plenty"; title: Middle English poetry; title: The politically incorrect world of the Middle Ages; title: The Canterbury Tales vs. The Handmaid's Tale; title: The dreary world of The Handmaid's Tale; title: The fecundity of medieval art; title: A pre-classical aesthetic; title: In the light of eternity; title: Christianity and freedom; title: Separation of church and state, medieval style; title: The argument from authority; title: The invention of chivalry; title: The Renaissance: Christian Humanism; title: Christopher Marlowe; title: William Shakespeare; title: The tragedies; title: The comedies; title: The sonnets; title: The Seventeenth Century: Religion as a Matter of Life and Death; title: John Donne; title: John Milton; title: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Age of Reason; title: John Dryden; title: Alexander Pope; title: Jonathan Swift; title: Samuel Johnson; title: "The proper study of mankind is man"-or is it?; title: The Nineteenth Century: Revolution and Reaction; title: Revolutionary repeat; title: Wordsworth and Coleridge; title: Byron and the Shelleys; title: Keats; title: Jane Austen: Without a room of her own; title: Celebrating "patriarchal values"; title: Women who are bossy (and talk too much); title: Men who aren't patriarchal enough; title: The benefits (to women) of "sexist" conventions; title: Victorian literature; title: Dickens; title: The Twentieth Century: The Avant-Garde, and Beyond; title: Decadents and aesthetes; title: Modernism; title: American Literature: Our Own Neglected Canon; title: Big country, short attention spans; title: The mystery of evil; title: The possibility of escape; title: Why we should still read Huckleberry Finn (despite the ugly racial epithets); title: Literature from the Deep South; title: "A hillbilly Thomist"; title: Why They Don't Want You to Learn about English and American Literature; title: How the PC English Professors Are Suppressing English Literature (Not Teaching It); title: English professors teach anything and everything...except English literature; title: Why they don't want you to read English and American literature; title: "Theory"-Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and bashing dead white males; title: Postmodernist jargon: hideously ugly, mentally crippling; title: Reality-denial as a critical stance; title: What Literature Is For: "To Teach and Delight"; title: What literature is really for; title: Which literature is truly great?; title: Truth, beauty, and goodness; title: How You Can Teach Yourself English and American Literature-Because Nobody Is Going to Do It for You; title: How to Get Started (Once You Realize You're Going to Have to Read the Literature on Your Own); title: "Close reading"; title: Reed's Rule; title: What seems like an ordinary line of poetry; title: The nuts and bolts of literary analysis; title: The words themselves (what they mean, what they sound like, where they come from); title: A use for English grammar, after all; title: Meter, verse forms, genres, and beyond; title: Learn the Poetry by Heart-See the Plays-Gossip about the Novels (That's Just What Jane Austen Did); title: Learn the poetry by heart; title: See the plays as often as you can-or, better yet, act in them; title: Read the great novels, lend them to your friends, and gossip about the characters.