New Materials: September 29, 2006

The LRC runnneth over with new materials! See some selections below:

A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture
Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins
Garland, 2000

City Centre, Main Collection, P94.5 .C55 N43 2000

“This volume joins the excellent series edited by Jack Zipes, which offers sophisticated critical studies that challenge the canon and canonized readings of literature for children.”
-Choice

A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding
Ed. Robert Nye
Persea Books, 1996
City Centre, Main Collection, PS3519 .A363 A6 1996

“Editor Nye presents poems by modern literature’s angel of devastation and Robert Graves’s mad muse–poems that have come to seem more and more important to literature. Equal parts stage rhetoric and singsong, Riding’s poems are like prophecies uttered by a child. Her influence can be felt not only in the work of her sometime lover Graves but in that of poets as diverse as W.H. Auden, May Swenson, and John Ashbery.” -Library Journal

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, (A story of New York, 1893) an authoritative text, backgrounds and sources, the author and the novel, reviews and criticism
Stephen Crane, edited by Thomas A. Gullason
WW Norton, 1979
City Centre, Main Collection, PS1449 .C85 M34 1979
“Stephen Crane’s first novel is the tale of a pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness. It was considered so sexually frank and realistic, that the book had to be privately printed at first. It and GEORGE’S MOTHER, the shorter novel that follows in this edition, were eventually hailed as the first genuine expressions of Naturalism in American letters and established their creator as the American apostle of an artistic revolution which was to alter the shape and destiny of civilization itself. “

See more new materials below:

BBC In Our Time

BBC Radio 4 produces an excellent program called In Our Time which is now available as a series of podcasts free online. Not only can you listen to the broadcast, you can also follow up on the topic with theSubject Research area (a librarian’s dream!).

The latest show investigates the life and legacy of Alexander Von Humboldt:

“Darwin described him as ‘the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived’. Goethe declared that one learned more from an hour in his company than eight days of studying books and even Napoleon was reputed to be envious of his celebrity ” (BBC Radio 4)

If Von Humboldt doesn’t fascinate you, you can also visit the In Our Time Archive page, which can direct to you recordings of past broadcasts on Pastoral Literature, Chaucer, Goethe, Marlowe, Ruskin, the Scottish Enlightenment, Rhetoric, and much more.

Enjoy.

Searchpath

I’ve heard some concern from a few students and instructors regarding the Searchpath Tutorial not saving students’ marks.

Unfortunately, fixing the root problem will require some time. In the meantime there are 2 workarounds that avoid the problem.  The best solution for students is to use Mozilla Firefox as their web browser.  The other alternative for those intent on using Explorer as their web browser is for students to exit the tutorial after each module and re-enter as a return user to begin a new module.
If students have already completed the entire tutorial and Searchpath did not save their marks, please let them know that they do not have to go through the entire tutorial again. Each individual module has a table of contents that will allow them to skip directly to the quiz for that module.

Please contact me (-5251) or Karen Hering (-5141)  if your students seem to be experiencing these issues — in the meantime, please suggest the two workaround solutions to students and, as always, encourage them to come to the LRC Reference Services desk (or call 5882) for assistance.

What’s on the Web? Herb Block, Slave Narratives, and More

From the Scout Report:

• Enduring Outrage: Editorial Cartoons by Herblock http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/herblock-home.html
  “This exhibition features original work by the Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Herb Block and draws from the generous gift of 14,000 original drawings and more than 50,000 preparatory sketches donated to the Library of Congress by the Herb Block Foundation in 2002.”

• Slave Narratives http://moadsf.org/salon/exhibits/slave_narratives/index.html
  

  With a powerful narration by Dr. Maya Angelou, the opening frames of the Slave Narrative website pique even the most casual visitors’ interest immediately. Created by the Museum of the African Diaspora.

• Selections from the Naxi Manuscript Collection http://international.loc.gov/intldl/naxihtml/naxihome.html
  “Selections from the Naxi Manuscript Collection features ceremonial writings of the Naxi people of Yunnan Province, China. The Library of Congress’s Naxi collection is the largest outside of China and is considered one of the finest in the world. The Naxi use a unique pictographic writing system that is similar to the ancient Egyptian and Mayan writing systems. It is the only living pictographic language in the world today. This online presentation features 185 manuscripts, a 39½ -foot funerary scroll, and an annotated catalog of the entire collection.”

New Books in the LRC: Week of September 18

Some interesting new receipts in the LRC this week:

Faulkner’s Narrative Poetics: Style as Vision
Arthur F. Kinney
University of Massachusetts Press, 1978

From the book jacket: “This is the first major attempt to understand Faulkner’s fiction and famous convoluted style by examining his work alongside those novelists Faulkner himself studied. Pointing directly to similarities in purpose and style, Arthur F. Kinney argues that Faulkner’s technique was highly controlled and necessary, the only way he could find to catch precisely the ideas and emotions known and intuited, in the characters he created and the readers he envisioned.”

The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet
Leslie Kane, Editor
Routledge, 2004

“The roster of con artists, liars and thieves and the themes of justice, violence and moral ambiguity in the works of Mamet and Pinter attest to the centrality of crime for those writers. In this collection, Lane (English, Westfield State College) has gathered 14 original essays that consider individual plays and screenplays as well as topics such as Pinter and Mamet in the context of the Victorian concept of crime and the descendants of Melville’s Confidence Man in Mamet’s work. Lane introduces the volume with a critical overview of both dramatists.”

Gothic Passages:Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic
Justin D. Edwards
University of Iowa Press, 2003

From the book jacket — “This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. Justin Edwards examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity.”

See below for (many) more new materials.

What’s on the Web?

Internet resources in student papers may make you cringe, but the web is full of interesting and edifying diversions! Some featured resources from the July / August issue of Choice: 

• Intute http://www.intute.ac.uk/ 
  The new face of the now-combined Humbul Humanities Hub and Artifact sites, Intute provides well-catalogued links to a range of web resources in the hunmanitied and sciences.
• TEAMS Middle English Texts http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm 
  Online Middle English texts from the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages.
• Centre for Applied Linguistics http://www.cal.org/
  The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) is a private, nonprofit organization working to improve communication through better understanding of language and culture.
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Database http://library.tamu.edu/cushing/sffrd
  Hal W. Hall’s collection of more than 73 000 historical and critical citations about the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
• Reading Women Writers and African Literature http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/AFLIT/FEMEChomeEN.html
  This site provides an overview of francophone African women writers, south of the Sahara. 
• Geoffrey Chaucer http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/ 
  Harvard’s Chaucer site provides introductory and critical articles, translations, glossed versions of relevant sources, visual and auditory aids, and many other resources.

Multi-Instructor Reserves

We’d be happy to put items on reserve for multiple instructors. The instructors should decide which materials will be in the group reserves, and send a representative to the LRC Borrower Services Desk to deposit the materials and fill out the Reserves Form, indicating clearly that this material is for All Instructors.

If anyone has any questions, or would like assistance putting materials on reserve for a group, please contact me by email at betzs3 @ macewan.ca, or the Borrower Services Desk (497-5850).

New Materials in the LRC: Week of Sept. 5

Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets
Laurence Lieberman
University of Missouri Press, 1995
PS 325 .L48 1995

“With stunningly precise formal, biographical, and cultural analysis, Laurence Lieberman turns his critical eye to American poets and confirms his prodigious talent not only as a narrative poet, but as a critic and essayist as well. What Lieberman aspires to do in Beyond the Muse of Memory, a collection of new and previously published essays, is to send the reader back to major poets for a fresh look and to neglected artists for close study.”
- University of Missouri Press

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The Maximus Poems
Charles Olson
Unversity of California Press, 1983
PS 3529 .L655 1983

“This complete edition of The Maximus Poems brings together the three volumes of Charles Olson’s long poem in an authoritative version.”
-University of California Press

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Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature, and Canadian Culture
William Closson James
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
PS 8101 . R4 J36 2000″

In ten lively and wide-ranging essays, William Closson James examines various derivations of the sacred in contemporary Canadian culture. Most of the essays focus on the religious aspects of modern Canadian English fiction — for example, in essays on the fiction of Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Margaret Atwood and Joy Kogawa. But James also explores other, non-literary events and activities in which Canadians have found something transcendant or revelatory. “

-Wilfrid Laurier University Press

See more new titles below:

Welcome to Literature in the LRC

Welcome to the first edition of Literature in the LRC. On this site you’ll find information about new materials arriving in the LRC, news about upcoming events, and information for English faculty.

Please feel free to contact me or post to this blog with any comments or questions.

Sonya Betz, English / Reference Librarian
betzs3 @ macewan.ca