Written before the successful publication of Skellig (1998), David Almond's short story collection, "Counting Stars," has attracted less critical attention than his more famous novels. Falling between fiction and autobiography, the earlier short stories are more firmly grounded in realism than the novels, which feature elements of…

How are we to understand the power of certain literary metaphors? The author argues that the apprehension of good metaphors is importantly similar to the apprehension of fruitful mathematical analogies: both involve a structural realignment of vision. The author then explores consequences of this claim, drawing conceptually significant parallels…

Sharon Creech's "Walk Two Moons" is a defining example of contemporary realistic fiction for children. This article argues that "Walk Two Moons" models storytelling as a tool which children need to understand their own relationship to reality and to literature. Rather than employing a grim verisimilitude, as some critics have charged, Creech has…

Authors of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) adolescent novels have recently moved away from addressing the "problem" of sexual identity and have instead focused on personal and societal "acceptance" of non-normative sexualities. Within the increasing number of "acceptance" titles published depicting gay males,…

The Muskogee dialect letters provide one of the most interesting combinations of fictional viewpoints and political commentary in American Indian letters. This article features the life story of Thomas E. Moore. This article also presents the fictional literary works of Moore and compares his dialect writings to Alexander Posey. Moore is the most…

This study examined children's literature and the development of biography intended for juvenile readers. The writer assembled a list of characteristics of writing for children, reviewed the growth of biography as a literary form, and noted the difference between biography written for the child audience and that intended for adults. Qualities were…

Since the publication of the first young adult novel to deal with issues of sexual identity, John Donovan's ("1969") "I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip", over 200 novels have been published centered around gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) characters and conflicts (Cart and Jenkins, "2006", "The Heart has…

Discusses the current controversy about too much realism in children's literature and concludes, by citing several examples of recent children's and adolescents' books, that literary quality together with realistic plots and characters makes good books. (TO)

Describes the unorthodox methods used by a high school English teacher to get the meaning of such literary terms as "classicism,""romanticism,""realism," and "naturalism" across to her students. (RBW)

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not…

Considering four separate literatures (Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian) as one general body of Yugoslav literature, the significance and evolution of current literary genres since 1945 are noted. The effects of varying political conditions, controversies over fundamental literary questions, important thematic changes, and increased…

In recent years a great deal of work on mathematical word problems has focused on efforts to bring more of "real life" into the problems themselves and students' uptake of these problems. Following on from earlier studies of the word problem as a pedagogical and literary genre, the author argues that we cannot unproblematically assume an ability…

Sherman Alexie's "Reservation Blues" has inspired both admiration and castigation. Critics such as Stephen Evans, Adrian C. Louis, Joseph Coulombe, and James Cox have praised Alexie's satiric upending of stereotypes about Native Americans, claiming that Alexie's work "uses stereotypes...of the...Indian, in new and entirely moral and ethical ways."…

In analyzing literary works within a conceptual framework, the student needs the freedom to choose from a variety of critical standpoints and to discover for himself various approaches to the literary symbol. To illustrate the necessity of movement from one theory to another, the theories are arranged in the following order: transcendental theory…

This dissertation analyzes why Heliodorus pays so much attention to foreign languages in the Aethiopica and how his description of these linguistic phenomena colors the work. It demonstrates that Heliodorus is very careful to attribute linguistic abilities to characters in a sensible way that is in line with real-world expectations. Characters…