Gale Researcher Guide for: Aphra Behn: Professional Woman Writer is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Slavery and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.

This single-source guide to selected biographical dictionaries and directories covers the entire spectrum of biographical sources (serial and nonserial) that have been published in the last ten years. In each entry the book gives complete bibliographic information along with price and a critical evaluation. Most entries have been selected from American Reference Books Annual (ARBA), between 1986 and 1997. Organized in two broad categories-International and National Biographies and Biographies in Professional Fields-listings are also easily accessed through detailed author/title and subject indexes. This work will be valuable to reference librarians, researchers, and others who require information on the lives of individuals from all fields of study and all time periods, and of particular use to those involved in the library acquisition process.

One of the greatest challenges for English language arts teachers today is the call to engage students in more complex texts. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literary criticism a powerful tool for helping students tackle challenging literary texts. Tim breaks down the dense language of critical theory into clear, lively, and thorough explanations of many schools of critical thought---reader response, biographical, historical, psychological, archetypal, genre based, moral, philosophical, feminist, political, formalist, and postmodern. Doing Literary Criticism gives each theory its own chapter with a brief, teacher-friendly overview and a history of the approach, along with an in-depth discussion of its benefits and limitations. Each chapter also includes ideas for classroom practices and activities. Using stories from his own English classes--from alternative programs to advance placement and everything in between--Tim provides a wealth of specific classroom-tested suggestions for discussion, essay and research paper topics, recommended texts, exam questions, and more. The accompanying CD offers abbreviated overviews of each theory (designed to be used as classroom handouts, examples of student work, collections of quotes to stimulate discussion and writing, an extended history of women writers, and much more. Ultimately, Doing Literary Criticism offers teachers a rich set of materials and tools to help their students become more confident and able readers, writers, and critical thinkers.

The Handbook to Literary Research is a practical guide for students embarking on postgraduate work in Literary Studies. It introduces and explains research techniques, methodologies and approaches to information resources, paying careful attention to the differences between countries and institutions, and providing a range of key examples. This fully updated second edition is divided into five sections which cover: tools of the trade – a brand new chapter outlining how to make the most of literary resources textual scholarship and book history – explains key concepts and variations in editing, publishing and bibliography issues and approaches in literary research – presents a critical overview of theoretical approaches essential to literary studies the dissertation – demonstrates how to approach, plan and write this important research exercise glossary – provides comprehensive explanations of key terms, and a checklist of resources. Packed with useful tips and exercises and written by scholars with extensive experience as teachers and researchers in the field, this volume is the ideal Handbook for those beginning postgraduate research in literature.

“This collection, because of its exceptional theoretical coherence and sophistication, is qualitatively superior to the most frequently consulted anthologies on Latin American women’s history and literature . . . [and] represents a new, more theoretically rigorous stage in the feminist debate on Latin American women.”—Elizabeth Garrels, Massachusetts Institute of Technology