Overview

 Over his long and distinguished teaching career, whenever Edgar Roberts taught literature and composition he dedicated a substantial amount of his class time to explaining to students how they should go about effectively completing their writing assignments. He found that, the more time he spent demonstrating how to write clearly, strategically, and persuasively about literary works, the better the students’ final essays were. Over the years, he tried and tested hundreds of assignments on hundreds of literary works in his own classes and came up with many valuable suggestions for how to improve students’ ability to write about literature. To enable him to share his experience and his successful teaching strategies, Professor Roberts attempted to create his ideal resource for literature and composition classrooms; it had to include both a rich anthology of diverse classic and contemporary works and a thorough, practical presentation of writing skills and strategies to use in analyzing these works.   Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, Compact Sixth Edition is founded on these principles of writing about literature. First, students should learn how to engage deeply and critically with a broad selection of stories, poems, and plays. Second, the writing process must be carefully and thoroughly integrated into the presentation of all literary genres, elements, and major writers throughout the entire text, not relegated to a single separate chapter or appendix. Complete coverage of writing about each literary element, “casebooks” that allow for deeper exploration of important writers in each genre, and a total of 53 exemplary student essays and paragraphs with accompanying commentary ensure that students gain a thorough comprehension of the conventions, strategies, and organizational patterns to allow them to think critically about literature and to produce thoughtful and compelling essays, paragraphs, documented research papers, and examination responses.

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About Edgar V. Roberts   Edgar V. Roberts, Emeritus Professor of English at Lehman College of The City University of New York, is a native of Minnesota. He graduated from the Minneapolis public schools in 1946, and received his Doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1960. He taught English at Minnesota, the University of Maryland Overseas Division, Wayne State University, Hunter College, and Lehman College. From 1979 to 1988, He was Chair of the English Department of Lehman College.   He served in the U.S. Army in 1946 and 1947, seeing duty in Arkansas, the Philippine Islands, and Colorado. He published articles about the plays of Henry Fielding, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation. In 1968 he published a scholarly edition of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), and in 1969 he published a similar edition of Fielding's The Grub-Street Opera (1731), both with the University of Nebraska Press. He first published Writing About Literature (then named Writing Themes About Literature) in 1964, with Prentice Hall. Since then, this book has undergone twelve separate revisions, for a total of thirteen editions. In 1986, with Henry E. Jacobs of the University of Alabama, he published the first edition of Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. After Professor Jacobs's untimely death in the summer of 1986, Professor Roberts continued working on changes and revisions to keep this text up to date. The Ninth Edition was published early in 2009, with Pearson Longman. The Fourth Compact Edition of Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing was published in 2008.   Professor Roberts is an enthusiastic devoté of symphonic music and choral singing, having sung in local church choirs for forty years. Recently he has sung (bass) with the New Choral Society of Scarsdale, New York (where he lives), singing in classic works by Handel, Beethoven, Bruckner, Bach, Orff, Britten, Brahms, and others. He is a fan of both the New York Mets and the New York Yankees. When the two teams play in inter-league games, he is uneasy because he dislikes seeing either team lose. He also likes both the Giants and the Jets. He has been an avid jogger ever since the early 1960s, and he enjoys watching national and international track meets.   Professor Roberts encourages queries, comments, and suggestions from students who have been using any of the various books. Use the following email address: edgar.roberts@verizon.net.   About Robert Zweig Robert Zweig is a tenured, full professor at Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York.  He teaches courses in Literature and Writing and for many years was the Intensive Writing Coordinator for the college. He has a doctorate in English Literature from the City University of New York, a Masters from Queens College in creative writing and a bachelor’s degree from Queens College in English literature. Dr. Zweig has numerous peer-reviewed publications in journals, encyclopedias and books. Dr. Zweig is co-author of Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, a bestselling introduction to literature textbook published by Pearson.  His translations of the Italian poet and Nobel Laureate Eugentio Montale appear in this text.   Dr. Zweig has lectured extensively throughout the United States and Italy on Victorian Literature, Poetics and contemporary culture. Some of t

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