Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, MLA Update Edition - Softcover

Kennedy, X. J.; Gioia, Dana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0134586441 ISBN 13: 9780134586441

Publisher: Pearson, 2016

Synopsis

For introductory courses in Literature.

This version of Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing has been updated the reflect the 8th edition of the MLA Handbook (April 2016).*

 

Cultivate a Love of Literature…

The smallest and most economical member of the Kennedy/Gioia family, Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, 5/e is a brief paperback version of the discipline's most popular literature anthology.  

Backpack Literature introduces college students to the appreciation and experience of literature in its major forms and develops the student’s ability to think critically and communicate effectively through writing.  The book is built on the assumption that great literature can enrich and enlarge the lives it touches. Both editors, literary writers themselves, believe that textbooks should be not only informative and accurate but also lively, accessible, and engaging.

* The 8th edition introduces sweeping changes to the philosophy and details of MLA works cited entries. Responding to the “increasing mobility of texts,” MLA now encourages writers to focus on the process of crafting the citation, beginning with the same questions for any source. These changes, then, align with current best practices in the teaching of writing which privilege inquiry and critical thinking over rote recall and rule-following.

 

About this title

About the Author

X. J. Kennedy, after graduating from Seton Hall and Columbia, became a journalist second class in the Navy.

His poems, some published in The New Yorker, were first collected in Nude Descending a Staircase (1961). Since then he has published seven more collections, including a volume of new and selected poems in 2007, 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, 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 five 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. After years of writing and reading late in the evenings after work, he quit a vice presidency to write and teach. He has published four collections of poetry, Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and Pity the Beautiful (2012); 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. From 2003 to 2009 he served as the 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 literary reading by creating The Big Read, which helped reverse a quarter century of decline in U.S. reading. He is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pearson
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0134586441
• ISBN 13: 9780134586441
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 1232