Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" is a foundational text for scholars who are addressing questions of authorship and textual ownership in English studies and its neighboring disciplines. Barthes's essay is typically presented without significant attention to the circumstances and context surrounding its initial English…

This article presents an interview with the noted Nepali American fiction writer Samrat Upadhyay. Samrat Upadhyay's fiction is mostly about his native country of Nepal, but he writes mainly for an Anglo-American audience. In the interview, Upadhyay not only discusses his own work, but he also examines samples of prose by other Asian or Asian…

Diane Ravitch's book, "The death and life of the great American school system," is an exploration and critique of educational change in the United States since the report "A Nation at Risk" in 1983 and more specifically since the passing of the No Child Left Behind legislation in January, 2002. Arguably, there are several…

This book describes the efforts made between 1815 and 1854 to secure an Anglo-American copyright agreement and indicates the factors that caused such efforts to fail. The book reports the effects that the lack of a copyright agreement had on overall Anglo-American relations and on British and American writers and publishers. Chapters provide…

The author of this article provides a critical assessment of Simon J. Ortiz's collection of poetry, "Out There Somewhere," to see how this literature of resistance continues through cultural connections. The resistance one finds in the poems--against mainstream political, social, and economic forces--results in continuance of Ortiz's…

The work of a number of American literary critics on the novels of contemporary Spanish women are reviewed. It is argued that the criticism generally suffers from ethnocentrism and lacks insight into the reality of the lives of Spanish women. The works of Matute, Martin, Gaite, and Quiroga, among others, are discussed. (EF)

Improvisation, or creative dramatics, has come to be regarded as a learning tool in English instruction. This study provides a comparative history of informal drama as it developed in England and the United States from 1910 to 1975. Pivotal writers on improvisation were identified, compared, and contrasted, analyzing their goals and practices.…

This is an integrated, classified listing of 18,321 Ph.D. dissertations, prepared so that doctoral students in English or American literature could determine whether or not their potential dissertation topic had been treated in the United States, Britain, or Germany. Subject classification headings also include sections for some dissertations in…

The author found "This Bridge Called My Back" at the local public library when she was, at age thirty-three, finally beginning to write again, and write honestly. There were Indian voices in "Bridge"--a few poems or personal narratives that moved her, but which barely began to represent the range of the writers or the…