Product Description

Written in an entertaining and informative way, and containing a wealth of practical advice and scholarly insights, this wise, witty and helpful book should be on every literature student's bookshelf.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #318799 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

From the Back Cover

Writing about Literature combines detailed practical and scholarly advice with a sense of the scope and creative possibilities of literary criticism, empowering the student reader to make his or her own discoveries and experiments with language. In addition, it gives valuable guidance on adult language learning and translation skills for students of foreign literature.

This handy, accessible guide covers all aspects of the essay-writing process, including:

* preliminary reading, and choosing and researching a topic
* referencing and presentation
* computer use
* style, structure, vocabulary, grammar and spelling
* the art and craft of writing
* scholarly and personal insights into the problems and pleasures of writing about literature.

Written in an entertaining and informative way, and containing a wealth of practical advice and scholarly insights, this wise, witty and helpful book should be on every literature student's bookshelf.

About the Author
Judith Woolf is a Senior Lecturer at the University of York, where she teaches English and Italian literature.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
My main criticism is the misleading subtitle `Essay and translation skills for university students of English and foreign literature'. Of twelve chapters, only one handles `foreign literature' and, in fact, it really only discusses foreign language learning in general, and mentions very little about the particular issues students might encounter with foreign literature. The section on translation is pitifully short. How can the author (or more likely the publisher) justify putting `translation skills' in the subtitle when the book has only four and a half pages on translation?

The book does cover how to write essays a bit better. The advice given is useful in places (the chapter on bad advice to avoid, for example). But I think there are much better books out there for this purpose. Kelley Griffith's `Writing Essays about Literature', for example, gives a step by step approach to each area of literature and provides extensive examples. It's a more expensive book, but you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Finally, there is a lot of irrelevant and useless, even patronizing, information padding the book out. How many university entrants nowadays really don't know which dictionary to use and how to use it, how to do a basic web search using google or how to avoid straining their eyes when using a monitor, for example?