Using contemporary themes, culturally and historically diverse selections, and thought-provoking questions that illuminate key literary concepts, this brief, thematic anthology invites readers to explore vital human issues raised by various genres of the written word. Acclaimed author Wendy Steiner masterfully addresses a variety of approaches to exploring literature, including close readings of literary texts, a social issues-based approach (e.g. gender identity and war), and an introduction to literature as a discipline (genre, canon, metaphor, etc.).

Advanced Praise for Literature as Meaning (Penguin Academics Series) by Wendy Steiner

What I really like about this text is that it models good writing: crisp, intelligent, muscular, and engaging…I enjoyed the writing more in this book than in any I have reviewed.

                                        --Crystal Jenkins Woods, Columbus State University

The first thing that impressed me is the author’s writing style.  It’s some of the clearest, tightest writing I’ve seen about literature in an introductory text.

                                        --Nancy Kennedy, Edmonds Community College

The strengths of this text are its variety, its thoughtfulness about how a range of texts work together, and its firm belief in the importance of literature.  I also think a great deal of thought has gone into making it inclusive of a range of perspectives.

                                        --Douglas A. Brooks, Texas AandM University

[T]he author’s approach emphasizes canonical diversity, the social relevance of literature, and a consideration of the aesthetic and “formal” aspects of literary creation…I like all of the author’s thematic choices, and find some especially challenging and innovative… I found the groupings and connections both useful and provocative.”

                                        --Thomas Gerard McNamee, Eastern Oregon University

It's a smart, well-thought out anthology. It understands how best to present literature to students, it recognizes what they are interested in, and how a huge range of writing can be employed to engage with, develop and challenge these interests. It is accessible without being patronizing, challenging without being overwhelming, and it does justice to both the issues examined and the fact that they are explored through literary means.”

                                        --Antony Shuttleworth, Ohio State University

This anthology strikes me as an innovative and exciting approach to introducing literature. I think students too would become engaged in the fresh approach the anthology presents…The benefit of this text is that it is a “re-vision” of the standard approach of most literary anthologies. It would be interesting and rewarding to teach from.

                                        --Sallie Wolf, Arapahoe Community College  

I would imagine that the average student would likely be more curious and interested in studying literature after reading such an anthology.

                                        --Bonnie Jett Adams, State University of West Georgia

The Introduction, with its fine section on writing about literature, is the strongest element of the book.  While the book emphasizes themes, it does not omit concern with structure and technique, and the questions for the various sections are excellent. 

                                        --Marty G. Price, Mississippi State University

Literature as Meaning attempts to enlist students’ interest by a more topical selection of themes than the typical literature-as-experience anthology...

                                        --George Uba, University of California-Northbridge

I like the synthetic aspect of the approach, the bringing together of seemingly disparate works in order to integrate them.

                                        --John D. Humma, Eastern Oregon University

Preface.   

 

Introduction.   

What Is Literary Culture?   

Why Study Literature?   

The Structure of this Anthology.   

Literary Modalities.   

Writing about Literature.  

I. LITERARY TECHNIQUES.

1. The World in a Grain of Sand.  

Introduction.

Anonymous, “Madam, I’m Adam.”

Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue,” The Canterbury Tales.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII,“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

Ben Jonson, “To the Reader.”

Robert Herrick, “Upon Ben Jonson.”

Alexander Pope, “Couplet on Newton,” “Epigram: Engraved on the Collar of a Dog.”

William Blake, “To See a World in a Grain of Sand.” From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “A Memorable Fancy” and “Proverbs of Hell.”

William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up.”

Jane Austen, From Pride and Prejudice: opening paragraphs

Emily Dickinson, “Beauty crowds me till I die,” “A little madness in the Spring.”

Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” “Alba.”

Gertrude Stein, “Rose is a rose is a rose.” From Four Saints in Three Acts, “Pigeons on the grass alas.”

William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Robert Frost, “Dust of Snow,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Anonymous, “I like Ike.”

Sylvia Plath, “Metaphors.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I.”  

Jonathan Williams, “Be My Bloody Valentine.”

Andy Warhol, From The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, “Repetition adds up to reputation.”

Jenny Holzer, “Lack of Charisma Can Be Fatal.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.   

2. No Text Is an Island.  

Introduction.

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

King James Bible, Matthew, 14, 1–12:The Beheading of John the Baptist, John, 11: Lazarus.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXVII.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, iii, 52–81; II, ii, 86–105; II, ii, 550–605; III, i, 55–87

John Donne, “Song: Go and catch a falling star.”

Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.”

Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress.”

John Keats, “The Day Is Gone.”

Charles Baudelaire, “Spleen,” “The Eyes of Beauty.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

3. Words at Liberty.

Introduction.

John Donne, “The Flea.”

Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal.”

Lewis Carroll, “The Jabberwocky,” Humpty-Dumpty Explicates “Jabberwocky,” from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

William Makepeace Thackeray, “A Tragic Story.”

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Gertrude Stein, “Picasso,” “Susie Asado.”

Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.”

E. E. Cummings, “chanson innocente,” “love is more thicker than forget.”

Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” “Connoisseur of Chaos.”

Theodore Roethke, “The Waking.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.”

Mary Ellen Solt, “Forsythia.”

Gerald Stern, “I Remember Galileo.”

Linda Pastan, “Jump Cabling.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

4. Literary Genres: The Romance.

Introduction.

Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest.

The Brothers Grimm, “Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott.”

Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee,” “Eldorado.”

James Joyce, “Araby.”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.”

Anne Sexton, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Bruce Bennett, “The True Story of Snow White.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

II. LITERARY THEMES.

1. On Being a Woman.

Introduction.

Queen Elizabeth I, “Speech to the Troops at Tilbury,” “On Monsieur’s Departure.”

Aphra Behn, “When Maidens Are Young.”

Lady Mary Chudleigh, “To the Ladies.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “To George Sand:A Desire,” “To George Sand:A Recognition.”

Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Thomas Hardy, “The Ruined Maid.”

Emily Dickinson, “The Sea said ‘Come’ to the Brook,” “My river runs to thee,” “Mine by the right of white election!,” “I hide myself within my flower,” “If you were coming in the fall.”

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House.

Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (after Rihaku).

Langston Hughes, “The South.”

Zelda Fitzgerald, “Paint and Powder,” “The Original Follies Girl.”

Virginia Woolf, “What If Shakespeare Had Had a Sister?”

Dorothy Parker, “The Standard of Living.”

Simone De Beauvoir, From The Second Sex.  

Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing”  

Adrienne Rich, “Women,” “Power.”

Nikki Giovanni, “Master Charge Blues.”

Gladys Cardiff, “Combing.”

Helena Maria Viramontes, “The Moths.”

Ursula Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.”

Sandra Cisneros, “Barbie-Q.”

Wendy Wasserstein, The Man in a Case.

Carole Satyamurti, “I Shall Paint My Nails Red.”

Edward Hirsch, “Zora Neale Hurston.”

Eve Ensler, From The Vagina Monologues: “My Short Skirt,” “Eve Ensler’s Vagina Warrior Statement.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

2. On Being a Man.

Introduction.

William Shakespeare, Henry V, III, i, 1–34: “Once more unto the breach.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses.”         

Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet XLIII “How do I love thee?”    

William Ernest Henley, “Invictus.”         

W. B.Yeats, “Leda and the Swan.”            

Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues.”

W. H.Auden, “The Wanderer.”

Richard Wright, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.”

Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California.”      

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “I Would Like.”  

John Lennon/Paul Mccartney, “Nowhere Man.”  

Mick Jagger, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”    

Donald Justice, “Men at Forty.”            

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays.”

Seamus Heaney, “Digging.”

Henry David Hwang, “Sound of a Voice.”

Rose Del Castillo Guilbault, “Americanization Is Tough on ‘Macho’.”

André Dubus, “The Intruder.”

B. H. Fairchild, “Body and Soul.”

Rhina P. Espaillat, “Bilingual/Bilingüe.”

Ron Drummond, “As Zeus.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

3. Knowledge and Science.

Introduction.

King James Bible, Genesis 3:The Fall of Man.

Ovid, From The Metamorphoses: Icarus (1 AD).

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX, ll. 513–838.

Mary Shelley, From Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark.”

Ursula Le Guin, “Science Fiction and the Future.”

Michael Frayn, Copenhagen.

Lee Smith, “Botanizing Upon the Mountain:Two Stories.”

Julia Alvarez, “Víctor.”

John Maeda, “On art and science.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

4. Spirit and Body.

Introduction.

John Donne, “The Ecstasy,” “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow,” “Death be not proud,” “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

Anne Bradstreet, “The Flesh and the Body.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan.”

William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death.”

Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,To Christ Our Lord.”

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming.”

Dylan Thomas, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.”

Chinua Achebe, “Dead Men’s Path.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Hidden Door.”

Gabriel García Márquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”

Anthony Hecht, “Dover Bitch.”

Eavan Boland, “Anorexic.”

Raymond Carver, “Cathedral.”

Louise Erdrich, “Love Medicine.”

Joy Harjo, “Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On.”

Benjamin Sáenz, “To the Desert.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

5. War.

Introduction.

Washington Irving, “Containing Divers Speculations on War and Negotiations—Showing That a Treaty of Peace Is a Great National Evil.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Thomas Hardy, “Channel Firing.”

Siegfried Sassoon, “How To Die,” “Lamentations,” “Glory of Women.”

Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”

Ezra Pound, From Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

William Butler Yeats, “Easter, 1916.”

Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home.”

E. E. Cummings, “my sweet old etcetera,” “next to of course god america i.”

Sigmund Freud, From Civilization and Its Discontents.

Richard Eberhart, “The Fury ofAerial Bombardment.”

Joseph Heller, From Catch 22.

Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa.”

Bobbie Ann Mason, “Big Bertha Stories.”

Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried.”

Enid Shomer, “Women Bathing at Bergen-Belsen.”

Natalie Angier, “Is War Our Biological Destiny?”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

6. Nature and the Individual.

Introduction.

Sophocles, Oedipus the King.

William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men.”

Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night.”

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

Malvina Reynolds, “Little Boxes.”

Woody Allen, “My Speech to the Graduates.”

Derek Walcott, “The Virgins.”

Barbara Kingsolver, “Extinctions.”

Don DeLillo, From The Triumph of Death.

Barry Lopez, “Two Dogs at Rowena.”

Michael Pollan, From The Botany of Desire.

Samuel Hazo, “Looking into a Tulip.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

7. Food and the Kitchen

Introduction.

Ovid, From The Metamorphoses: ‘The Golden Age’ and ‘Tereus, Philomela, and Procne.’

Omar Khayyam, The Rubáiyát, I–XI.

Geoffrey Chaucer, From “The Pardoner’s Tale,” The Canterbury Tales.

François Rabelais, From Gargantua.

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene.

Anonymous, “I Know an Old Lady.”

Christina Rossetti, “The Goblin Market.”

Marcel Proust, From Swann’s Way.

Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist”  

Edna St.Vincent Millay, “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink.”

William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say.”

Alice B.Toklas, From The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook: “Murder in the Kitchen.”

Anne-Marie Levine, “Soup.”

Helen Fielding, From Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Michael Cunningham, From The Hours.

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

8. Liberty and Equality.

Introduction.

William Shakespeare, From The Merchant of Venice.

Ben Jonson, “To My Booke.”

John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.”

George Gordon, Lord Byron, “When a Man Hath No Freedom to Fight for at Home.”

Frederick Douglass, From My Bondage and My Freedom.

Walt Whitman, From Leaves of Grass.

Robert Browning, “Why I Am a Liberal.”

W. S. Gilbert, From The Gondoliers,“There Lived a King,As I’ve Been Told.”

Kate Chopin, “Story of an Hour.”

Zora Neale Hurston, “Magnolia Flower.”

Langston Hughes, “Dream Variations,” “Song for a Dark Girl.”   

Oscar Hammerstein, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”

Stephen Sondheim, “Gee, Officer Krupky.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr,. “Harrison Bergeron.”

Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream.”

Toni Cade Bambara, “The Lesson.”

Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Refugee Ship.”

Martin Espada, “Bully.”

Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches.  

Alicia Ostriker, “The Window, at the Moment of Flame.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.

9. Art and Reality.

Introduction.

Ovid, From The Metamorphoses: “Pygmalion and Galatea.”

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Emily Dickinson, “This was a Poet—It is That,” “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”

Oscar Wilde, “Preface,” from The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Marianne Moore, “Poetry.”

Archibald Macleish, “Ars Poetica.”

Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar.”

William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” “After Long Silence.”

James Baldwin, “Race and the African-American Writer.”

Howard Nemerov, “The Tapestry.”

Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.”

Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings.”

Don DeLillo, From White Noise.

Yasmina Reza, Art.

Nikki Moustaki, “How to Write a Poem After September 11^th.”

Questions for Writing and Discussion.   

Glossary.

 

Appendix: Table of Contents by Genre.

 

Credits.

 

Index.