JOHN MCRAE

Literary texts and extracts can provide a stimulating basis for classwork on language appreciation and oral fluency. This book for upper-intermediate and more advanced students contains a wide range of texts with related exercises which aim to make literature more accessible while developing general fluency. The book is organised thematically, covering such topics as Family, Environment, Rebellion, and Women. There is a minimum of three texts in each unit and the related activities are varied and thought-provoking, to stimulate and sustain discussion. The last part of each unit draws together what the students have read: first, by considering the different treatments of the theme; then by actively involving the students in a stimulation which relates theme to text; and finally, by analysing the literary uses of language illustrated in the texts. This book contains a wide range of texts with related exercises which aim to make literature more accessible while developing general fluency.

The fully revised edition of The Penguin Guide to Literature in English: Britain and Ireland provides an illustrated introduction to the work of the most important writers and their historical background from the year 600 to the present day. It covers writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Ian Banks and Irvine Welsh.

In 1963 President John F. Kennedy was shot, Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar, and the Beatles were in their prime. This was a changing world, which British and Irish writers both contributed to and reflected in drama, poetry and prose. The Routledge Guide to Modern English Writing tells the story of British and Irish writing from 1963 to the present. From the first performance of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the 1960s to lad novels and Chick Lit in the twenty-first century, the authors guide the reader through the major writers, genres and developments in English writing over the past forty years. Providing an in-depth overview of the main genres and extensive treatment of a wide range of writers including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Angela Carter, Benjamin Zephaniah and Nick Hornby, this highly readable handbook also offers notes on language issues, quotations from selected works, a timeline and a guide to other works. Written by the authors of The Routledge History of Literature in English (second edition 2001), The Routledge Guide to Modern English Writing is essential reading for all readers of contemporary writing.

This completely updated and expanded second edition of the wide-ranging and accessible Routledge History of Literature in English covers the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature with accompanying language notes exploring the interrelationships between language and literature. Highly praised for its readability and narrative style it charts the principal features of literary language development and highlights key language topics. With a span of over a thousand years, from AD 600 to the present day, it emphasizes the growth of literary writing, its traditions, conventions and changing characteristics, and includes literature from the margins, both geographical and cultural.