Popular Writing in America: The Interaction of Style and Audience

By Robert Atwan and Donald McQuade

Book Overview

Used for nearly two decades in schools nation-wide, this unique anthology offers provocative examples of successful, influential American writing drawn from advertising, the press, popular magazines, bestsellers, classics, film and television, suiting a variety of classroom purposes--topics for lively class discussions, practical models for student composition, and imaginative texts for literary study. The fifth edition places a new emphasis on multicultural perspectives on the media, and offers an infusion of new selections by a diversity of authors, both within and outside the established literary canon.

As always, every selection is connected either stylistically or thematically with one or more of the other selections, and an expanded "Table of Linked Selections" follows the "Rhetorical Table of Contents". This feature encourages readers to discover the different ways the same subject can be treated by different writers or by different media--for example, how staff writers for Time and Newsweek each handled the space shuttle disaster in January 1986, how a major author like Stephen Crane used his personal experience of a disaster at sea to write both a newspaper report and a classic American short story, or how Ernest Hemingway's famous short story, "Soldier's Home," was transformed into a film script.
Current and comprehensive, Popular Writing in America offers a unique method of teaching composition, one that appeals to students and teachers alike.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195073088
• ISBN13: 9780195073089
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 784 Pages
• Weight: 3.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 7.2" x 10.6"

Customer Reviews

Helps!

This book came great in helping me pass my class! Price for this book was awsome.

Wonderful anthology, but dated

You won't find another anthology that packs so many classic essays and stories (EB White, Stephen Crane, John Updike) with quality journalism and parts of popular novels (Tarzan, Godfather). The issue areas are still relevant--lyrics in popular music, violence in youth, sexism, persuasion in advertisements, popular hysteria (War of the Worlds in 1930s). But there's a disappointment too: the book has not been revised since 1993. So there's nothing on Columbine, the Twin Towers, recent rock group, terrorism, and display ads that young readers might recognize. It's a shame that the editors have moved on to other projects and another publisher, and that Oxford has not been able (or willing?) to update some of the issue areas. So four, not five stars.