The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (1987)

Anthology of literature -- short stories (45), poems (390), and plays (17). Includes canon pieces by such well-read authors as Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville, etc., but it also includes albums of surprising, foreign, female, and contemporary work, in the three genres. Fresh "biographical" material precedes the respective works. With both a brief and a detailed table of Contents, and Indices of First Lines, Authors and Titles, and Terms.

For the FICTION "story-teller" genre, examples of Plot, Character, Setting, POV [point of view], Symbolism, Theme, and "Style, Tone, and Irony" are followed by four stories each of two major figures: Nathaniel Hawthorne (b. 1804) and Flannery O'Connor (b. 1925).

The POETRY genre is a survey in sections such as Word Choice, Images, Figures of Speech, "Symbol, Allegory, and Irony", Sounds, Patterns of Rhythm, and Poetic Forms. Whole chapters are provided to Dickinson, Cummings, and Hughes, while still devoting a main Study to only two: John Keats (1795-1821, age 25), and Robert Frost (1874-1963).

A Study of Sophocles (496-406 bc) and Shakespeare (1564-1616) begins the DRAMA genre, followed by plays by Tennessee Williams, Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, "Fences" by Wilson, James Gibb, David Hwang, and others.

Each genre and each piece is linked with questions/"Connections". And the final section has essays on how to read and write about literature. This includes "Strategies", reviewing Formalist, Biographical, Psychological, Historical, Sociological (Marxist, Feminist, neo-canonical), Mythological, Reader-Response, and Deconstructionist. For example, a Brook Thomas essay on "A New Historical Approach to Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'", shows how our sense of the past depends upon art, but show also that even a student with little knowledge of the past, has an "attitude". The poem can help them reflect upon what the attitude is, and how it was produced. [pp 1807-1808].

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." ( )

I acquired this book from a college professor of English, but I have relatively little experience within college English departments myself, as I placed out of all my required English classes. I was thus somewhat disappointed with the analytical techniques being taught in this book. While I enjoyed the discussions of different approaches to literary criticism, they were too short for my taste, and most of the book's commentary on elements such as plot, characterisation, and different poetic forms struck me as immature for a college-level audience. I covered that information in high school and would have expected that most other students would have, too. The selection of readings in the book is incredibly generous, but there are many similar anthologies out there, so I can't say that this one stands out as being in any way spectacular. ( )