Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, Compact Edition (5th Edition) - Softcover

Kennedy, X. J.; Gioia, Dana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0321475771 ISBN 13: 9780321475770

Publisher: Longman, 2006

Synopsis

The concise version of the discipline's most popular introductory anthology, Kennedy/Gioia’s Literature, Compact Edition continues to inspire students with engaging insights on reading and writing about stories, poems, and plays.   Poets in their own right, editors X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia bring personal warmth and a human perspective to this compact, paperback anthology.  Organized into three genres—Literature, Compact Edition presents readable discussions of the literary devices, illustrated by apt works, supported by useful writing tips, and followed by (now) six full chapters devoted to writing.  A broad scope of traditional and contemporary works is provided, most headed by author images and richly detailed biographical notes and some followed by author commentary.  While maintaining the characteristics of its previous editions–accessible apparatus, expansive author representation–this Compact, Fifth Edition has been re-imagined to include new casebooks, a lively new design, and more writing coverage than ever before.

About this title

About the Author:

X. J. Kennedy , after graduation from Seton Hall and Columbia, became a journalist second class in the Navy (“Actually, I was pretty eighth class”). His poems, some published in the New Yorker, were first collected in Nude Descending a Staircase (1961). Since then he has written six more collections, several widely adopted literature and writing textbooks, and seventeen books for children, including two novels. He has taught at Michigan, North Carolina (Greensboro), California (Irvine), Wellesley, Tufts, and Leeds. Cited in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and reprinted in some 200 anthologies, his verse has brought him a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lamont Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Aiken-Taylor prize, the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, and the Award for Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English. He now lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Dorothy have collaborated on four books and five children.

 

Dana Gioia is a poet, critic, and teacher. Born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican ancestry, he attended Stanford and Harvard before taking a detour into business. ("Not many poets have a Stanford M.B.A., thank goodness!") After years of writing and reading late in the evenings after work, he quit a vice presidency to write and teach. He has published three collections of poetry, Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), and Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award; and three critical volumes, including Can Poetry Matter? (1992), an influential study of poetry's place in contemporary America. Gioia has taught at Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan (Connecticut), Mercer, and Colorado College.

 

He is also the co-founder of the summer poetry conference at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. From 2003-2009 he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. At the NEA he created the largest literary programs in federal history, including Shakespeare in American Communities and Poetry Out Loud, the national high school poetry recitation contest. He also led the campaign to restore active and engaged literary reading by creating The Big Read, which has helped reverse a quarter century of decline in U.S. reading. He currently divides his time between Washington, D.C. and Santa Rosa, California, living with his wife Mary, their two sons, and two uncontrollable cats.

 

About this edition

• Publisher: Longman
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0321475771
• ISBN 13: 9780321475770
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 1664