The Modern Language Association Of America: 55 books

This issue of Profession opens with pieces on the Common Core State Standards by Gerald Graff, Diane Ravitch, and Catharine R. Stimpson. It also features a series of essays that stem from 2013-14 MLA President Marianne Hirsch's Presidential Forum and sessions related to her theme, Vulnerable Times....

This issue of Profession contains Sidonie Smith's introduction to her Presidential Forum (held at the 2011 MLA convention) and the essays of forum participants Hillary Chute, Marianne Hirsch, Leigh Gilmore, Craig Howes, Françoise Lionnet, Nancy K. Miller, David Palumbo-Liu, Brian Rotman, Leo Spitzer,...

There were no reviews of Mansfield Park when it first appeared in 1814. Austen's reputation grew in the Victorian period, but it was only in the twentieth century that formal and sustained criticism began of this work, which addresses the controversies of its time more than Austen's earlier novels...

The First World War saw staggering loss of life and was a catalyst for many political and social changes. It was also shaped by the media and art forms that expressed it: film, photography, poetry, memoir, posters, advertisements, and music. This volume's scope shows that today's instructors...

Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and renowned memoirist, is one of the most widely read writers of post-World War II Italy. His works are characterized by the lean, dispassionate eloquence with which he approaches his experience of incarceration in Auschwitz. His memoirs--as well as his poetry and fiction...

When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Vénérande becomes enamored of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule's suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.

Indiana, George Sand's first solo novel, opens with the eponymous heroine brooding and bored in her husband's French countryside estate, far from her native Île Bourbon (now Réunion). Written in 1832, the novel appeared during a period of French history marked by revolution and regime change, civil...

The greatest work of one of France's greatest writers, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables has captivated readers for a century and a half with its memorable characters, its indictment of injustice, its concern for those suffering in misery, and its unapologetic embrace of revolutionary ideals. The novel's...

The moving, richly allegorical poem Pearl was likely written by the anonymous poet who also penned Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In it, a man in a garden, grieving the loss of a beloved pearl, dreams of the Pearl-Maiden, who appears across a stream. She teaches him the nature of innocence, God's...

Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature: from the presence of tuberculosis in Franz Kafka's fiction or childbed fever in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to disease in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska; from...

A trailblazing modernist, Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe with William James and went on to train as a medical doctor before coming out as a lesbian and moving to Paris, where she collected contemporary art and wrote poetry, novels, and libretti. Known as a writer's writer, she has...

A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse (*Les Fleurs du Mal* [*Flowers of Evil*]) and prose poems (*Le Spleen de Paris* [*Paris Spleen*]). This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and...

Service learning can help students develop a sense of civic responsibility and commitment, often while addressing pressing community needs. One goal of literary studies is to understand the ethical dimensions of the world, and thus service learning, by broadening the environments students consider,...

Australia and New Zealand, united geographically by their location in the South Pacific and linguistically by their English-speaking inhabitants, share the strong bond of hope for cultural diversity and social equality--one often challenged by history, starting with the appropriation of land from...