Literature and the Writing Process (11th Edition)

Book Preface

This book grew out of our long-standing interest in the possibilities of integrating the study of literature with the practice of composition. Many of our students have learned to write perceptively and well using literature as their subject matter. Great literature is always thought-provoking, always new. Why not utilize it to sharpen critical thinking and improve writing skills? Toward that end, we have combined an introduction-to-literature anthology with detailed instruction in the writing process.

Our Purpose

Literature and the Writing Process, Eleventh Edition, presents literary selections as materials for students to read, analyze, and write about. Our careful integration of rhetorical instruction with the critical study of literature guides students through the allied processes of analytical reading and argumentative writing. As a result, students learn how to write essays about the major features that are involved in interpreting short stories, poems, and plays.

New to This Edition

As always, we have been guided by the advice of our reviewers in revising this edition. Here is a list of the major additions and changes in the Eleventh Edition:

●● New Part And Chapter: Part V: Critical Approaches to Literature begins with a concise survey of the primary systems for interpreting literature and concludes with a new multi-genre Critical Casebook: Writing about Culture and Identity (Chapter 35). The casebook contains seven short stories, nine poems, and two plays that deal with issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, beliefs, and cultural values. The questions for writing and discussion in the casebook encourage students to examine their own thoughts and feelings on these topics.

●● New Feature: MultiModal Projects supplement and extend the writing ideas in the literary chapters, casebooks, and portfolios. These twenty-three assignments, which appear throughout the text, direct students to read, interpret, analyze, and compose in modes that go beyond text on the page, exploring digital, audio, visual, and creative modes. Students are prompted to engage with words, numbers, images, graphics, animations, music, and more.

●● New Portfoilo of four stories about “singular” women invites discussions of the ways women are characterized in fiction, encouraging comparisons across time and location.

●● Making Connections prompts are now available for all the selections in the anthologies, casebooks, and portfolios, inviting synthesis among selections.

●● New critical commentaries for works such as Langston Hughes’s poems and The Glass Menagerie have been added.

●● Updated sections have been included on reflective and argumentative writing and additional suggestions for doing researched writing, as well as discussion of additional forms, such as the prose poem.

●● New works include short stories by Arna Bontemps, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, H. H. Munro, Celeste Ng, and Eudora Welty; poems by Richard Blanco, Gregory Djanikian, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Edgar Lee Masters, Lisel Mueller, Frank O’Hara, Christina Rossetti, David Shumate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, David Wagoner, William Wordsworth, James Wright, and Mitsuye Yamada; and plays by Hernik Ibsen and Alice Childress