Ventura García Calderón (1886-1959) was a Peruvian man of letters and a diplomat who was at the center of the hispanophone community in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. Known as a proponent of Spanish American literature, García Calderón achieved a global celebrity for his dramatic, colorful, and ironic short stories. These…

Traces the denigration of discursive prose back through the "New Criticism" to Romanticism and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who saw poetry as special and separate from other rhetoric. Notes that discursive prose can be just as creative and interesting as poetry. Urges composition teachers to shift their point of view accordingly. (RL)

Using "historicist" techniques, scholars have offered challenging alternatives to standard views on the Romantic era. Historicists advocate yoking theories such as deconstruction with analyses of political, social, and other factors that played a role in the creation of period literature. An exhibit touring the United States is…

Using a college course on William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" as a case study, this book presents an alternative approach to teaching poetry. Divided into seven sections with 19 chapters, the book describes how students can develop and exercise an historical imagination in the…