Welcome to the Language and Literature Resources Guide. Here you will find a listing of the language and literature databases available at DSU and other helpful information resources. Hover over the info icon (i) to find out more about the database and then click on the link to access the specialized databases.
How Words Make Things Happen by
Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended. How Words Make Things Happen suggests that the conventional idea of persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker's control of calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy (which assumes that 'poetry makes
nothing happen') together have produced a misleading account of the relations between words and human action. Words do make things happen. But they cannot be counted on to produce the result they intend.
Left in the West by
Left in the West is an edited collection bringing together histories, biographies, close readings, and theories about the literary and cultural left in the American West, especially as it is distinct from the more often-theorized literary left in New York and major eastern metropolitan centers. The collection argues for a new understanding of the relationship between region, progressive political engagement, and literary and cultural work; Woods and her contributors examine the West as a unique socio-political region shaped by specific environmental, social, economic, and ethnic concerns. While the literary left in the West shared many interests with other regional expressions of "left," including labor, class, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism, the influence of Manifest Destiny and the distinct history of settler colonialism in western territories caused western leftists to develop concerns unique to the region, elevating issues of industrialization and environmental degradation, Native American sovereignty, and immigrant communities' access to power. And as this collection of essays makes clear, western leftists were (and are) deploying a broad range of literary genres and cultural techniques to address these unique concerns.
Liberating scholarly writing : the power of personal narrative by
This book provides an alternative to the more conventional modes of qualitative and quantitative inquiry currently used in professional training programs, particularly in education. It features a very accessible presentation that combines application, rationale, critique, and inspiration-and is itself an example of this kind of writing. It teaches students how to use personal writing in order to analyse, explicate, and advance their ideas. And it encourages minority students, women, and others to find and express their authentic voices by teaching them to use their own lives as primary resources for their scholarship.
Poet of Revolution by
This is a new account of the intellectual, literary and political development of one the central poets in the English canon. Author Nicholas McDowell follows John Milton more or less from his birth in 1608 and his education to his emergence as a polemical prose writer in the 1640s, concluding at the moment when Milton turned his pen to defending the execution of Charles I in 1649 in the closing years of the English Civil War, though several years before the onset of the poet's blindness and the composition of Paradise Lost. As the author makes explicit, this is not a book about the writing of Milton's great biblical epic; rather, it is a book about the formation of the mind that eventually would create this epic, though only after that same mind, of course, justified the killing of a king. Central to the book is Milton's evolving understanding of the ways in which 'tyranny'-defined initially in ecclesiastical and clerical terms but which grows to encompass political organization-retards the intellectual and cultural progress of a nation. McDowell demonstrates how this understanding was shaped not only by Milton's historical experience of the political turbulence of mid seventeenth-century Britain, but also by the interaction between that experience and his intellectual life. This, the author says, was Milton's period of intensive and almost entirely orthodox reading in history and religion, and it was then that he came to see any clerical encroachment upon civil authority as tyranny. His intellectual pursuits, in tandem with wider events, led him to turn to explicitly political prose writing in the defence of regicide at the beginning of 1649. This biography of the first half of the poet's life shows us how John Milton the young poet, scholar, humanist, and universalist became John Milton the puritan, republican and polemicist.
Find books on Language and Literature:
P Language and Literature
PN Literature (General)
PR English literature
PS American literature
PZ Fiction and juvenile