Focuses upon the use of vituperation by Milton and Salmasius in their defenses of the revolutionary and royalist positions, respectively, following the English Civil War. (RD)

Examines the works of the Indian author, Farrukh Dhondy, who wants his readers to explore a society that produces "ethnic problems." (HOD)

Examination of the characters of school administrators in British and American literature, supplemented by some biographical works, leads to the conclusion that school administrators are portrayed as villainous ogres, incompetent clods, or kindly altruists in the bulk of the earlier works, and are largely absent from the modern novel. (SK)

Examines how the physically disabled have been depicted in American literature over the years, from the nineteenth century association of disability with moral culpability, to the post-Civil War image of the cripple as victim, to the more recent portrayal of the cripple as survivor and hero. (MJL)

Describes a tour of the places of Jane Austen's novels that is offered by the Association for Cultural Exchange (ACE) in Cambridge, England. (JL)

Discusses teaching a college class in English Renaissance nondramatic literature. (AEA)

Considers the influences of biology on English literature between 1500 and 1900. Public education and interest in the biological sciences is examined from the viewpoints of medicine, agriculture, and natural history. Trends in literature are reviewed chronologically by century. (CS)

For almost 50 years, the 8th-grade graduating class at a New Jersey private elementary school has presented an expertly produced Shakespeare play, alternating between "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The whole school becomes involved, from younger kids reading story versions of the plays, to older kids making…

Sociolinguistic analysis of the speech patterns in Spenser's "The Faerie Queen, Book VI" indicated that the socially different characters' language styles did not vary much among themselves or from the narrative, suggesting that the strict verse scheme requirements and a concern for unity of literary style leveled out speech particularities. (CB)

Describes several approaches to teaching Robert Westall's "The Machine-Gunners." Questions the effectiveness of several activities which are commonly used to teach imaginative texts. (MM)

Shakespeare's use of Early Modern English in four major tragedies was analyzed to test a theory that power, distance, and the ranked extremity of a face-threatening act are the universal determinants of politeness levels in dyadic discourse. While affect strongly influenced politeness, interactive closeness had little or no effect on politeness.…

Describes a classroom study of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" which concentrates on the Weird Sisters and the question of witchcraft. Advocates utilizing pupils' experience of powerful images from the general culture, introducing a selection of well-documented historical evidence to support textual study, and avoiding misguided conventional…

Argues for increasing the use of nontraditional methodologies in the reading of Shakespeare's plays for secondary school students. Discusses the "myth of Shakespeare" and his plays as a cultural inheritance, an attitude that is implicitly encouraged by the British National Curriculum. Posits that children in the classroom should be in…

Discusses the importance of the stories of King Arthur. Observes that knowledge of myth can provide a way of examining a culture through its people's eyes. Argues that myth can be a tool of therapy and a model for belief. Concludes that the Arthurian myth has many contemporary points of reference. (SG)