"In the summer of 1977, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. This was twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl," and Jack Kerouac's seminal book On the Road. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to make a record of the history of Beat Literature....

What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface -- a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character - and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you. In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster...

"When hip-hop first emerged in the 1970s, it wasn’t expected to become the cultural force it is today. But for a young Black kid growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, it was everything. He stayed up late to hear the newest songs on the radio. He saved his money to buy vinyl as soon as it landed. He even started to try to make his own songs. That kid was Questlove, and decades later, he is a six-time Grammy Award–winning musician, an...

At the heart of fame is the tricky business of image management. Over the last 115 years, the celebrity autobiography has emerged as a popular and useful tool for that project. In Limelight, Katja Lee examines the memoirs of famous Canadian women like L. M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, the Dionne Quintuplets, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain to trace the rise of celebrity autobiography in Canada and the role gender has played in the rise to fame...

Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End details Grammy-winning music producer and author Ian Brennan's ongoing quest to provide musical platforms for underrepresented nations and populations around the world. In a compact and quick-read format, Missing Music collects the latest narratives from Brennan's field-recording treks. This edition features a greater emphasis on storytelling and an even greater abundance of photos from his...

First published in 1930, “Seven Types of Ambiguity” has long been recognized as a landmark in the history of English literary criticism. Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition, broad enough...

The esteemed American literary critic Edmund Wilson in depth study of Canadian literature, O Canada. O Canada is made up of studies of Canadian writers and books, mostly contemporary. It represents perhaps the first attempt on the part on an American critic to deal at the same time with the literatures of both French and English Canada. Among the authors discussed are Morley Callaghan, Hugh MacLennan, John Buell, E.J. Pratt, Anne Hebert, Marie-Claire...

Stimulating and masterly study examines the evolution of the great mass of fiction surrounding the Arthurian legend in Western literature - from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and the collection of Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion, to Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian stories, the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and such English masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Le Morte d'Arthur. Painstakingly researched...

The Roman Way was the author's second book, providing contrasts between ancient Rome and present-day life. Hamilton describes life as it existed according to ancient Roman poets such as Plautus, Virgil and Juvenal, interprets Roman thought and manners, and compares them to people's lives in the twentieth century. She also suggests how Roman ideas can be applied to the modern world.