- ISBN:9780521732314
- Format:Paperback
- Subject(s):English Literature
- Author(s):Midge Gillies
- Available from: No date available
Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres.
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×- Contents
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Each title includes a wide-ranging yet carefully levelled introductory discussion of a literary period, genre or theme, to provide students with an excellent introduction to an area of literature.
Helps students to address the new assessment objective 4 ('demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received') - worth up to 35% of the A level qualification under new guidelines.
Discussion questions and end-of-section tasks offer an invaluable resource for self study as well as helpful exam preparation.
A mini-anthology of texts and extracts saves teachers time searching for appropriate 'wider reading' texts.
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- Introduction
- 1. Reading life writing: The influence of early biographers: Plutarch, Izaak Walton, John Aubrey, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
- The Victorian approach
- Bloomsbury
- Autobiography
- Life Writing and the Second World War
- Women's autobiographical writing
- Family memoirs
- Biographical structure in the twentieth century and key writers
- Ethics and biography
- Assignments
- 2. Approaching the texts: How biographers choose their subjects
- Structuring a life
- New approaches to biography
- Other forms of life writing: letters and diaries, autobiographical fiction
- Sources
- Illustrations
- Assignments
- 3. Texts and extracts: Peter Ackroyd, from Dickens
- Maya Angelou, from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
- John Aubrey, from Brief Lives
- JG Ballard, from Empire of the Sun and Miracles of Life
- Vera Brittain, from Testament of Youth and Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War, Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends
- Elizabeth Gaskell, from The Life of Charlotte Brontë
- Brian Keenan, from An Evil Cradling
- Doris Lessing, from Alfred and Emily
- Primo Levi, from If This is a Man
- Alison Light, from Mrs Woolf and the Servants, Janet Malcolm, from The Silent Woman
- Sylvia Plath, 'Morning Song'
- Plutarch, from Parallel Lives
- James Shapiro, from 1599, A Year in the Live of William Shakespeare
- Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, from Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
- Virginia Woolf, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume III, 1925–30
- 4. Critical Approaches: The autobiographical writings of Doris Lessing
- Alfred and Emily
- Critical responses to Alfred and Emily
- Assignments
- 5. How to write about life writing: The writer and the reader
- Different perspectives: comparing texts
- The context of writing: facts and their emphasis
- Your own and other readers' interpretations
- Assignments
- 6. Resources: Chronology
- Further reading
- Websites
- Glossary
- Index
- Acknowledgements.
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