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Playing Preceptress – having fun during a pandemic with Hannah Webster Foster’s The Boarding School

Jonathan Beecher Field, Clemson University I teach Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette whenever I can, because it is one of those 1790 epistolary novels that remains sadly relevant to the lives of my students. If you have not had the pleasure, it’s a novel about a young woman named Eliza Wharton. At the beginning of…

“A Merry Christmas” (1887) from Glances Backward

The following is an excerpt from Glances Backward: An Anthology of American Homosexual Writing, 1830-1920, edited by James J. Gifford. This anthology brings together in one volume a broad selection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American writings about gay male love, including love stories, Westerns, ghostly tales, poetry, drama, essays, letters, and memoirs. We have…

Celebrating Canada Book Day with Lucy Maud Montgomery

To celebrate Canada Book Day this year, we thought we would share a brief excerpt from one of our favourite Canadian writers, Lucy Maud Montgomery! The following is excerpted from Appendix B of our edition of Anne of Green Gables, “Montgomery on Writing:‘The Way to Make a Book.’” Write, I beseech you, of things cheerful,…

Seeing Progress through History: Contemporary Reception of Wollstonecraft

To celebrate International Women’s Day, we are sharing a piece from one of the appendices of our edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman. We chose an excerpt from a rather harsh contemporary review of Wollstonecraft’s work to give us the opportunity to meditate on how far we…

From Charles Dickens, “What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older”

To celebrate the holiday season this year we thought we would share some words of beauty and hope from the great Charles Dickens, excerpted from from Appendix A of our edition of A Christmas Carol, edited by Richard Kelly. The following is from Dickens’s “What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older.” A happy holiday from…

Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat

From Appendix E  of Beautiful Joe: Chapter 3 of Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat by Louise S. Patteson (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1901) To recognize World Animal Day, we thought we would share an excerpt from the appendices of our Beautiful Joe, which sheds light on cat autobiographies and the reasons they were less popular.  This did not,…

Mythical Numbers and Their Role in Politics

In last night’s presidential debate, there were many often contradictory facts and figures thrown out by both candidates. With so many numbers being presented to the public, it is sometimes hard to distinguish what is fact, what is fiction, and how to critically think about the issues. Is That a Fact author Mark Battersby brings…

The Helpful Suggestions of Academic Writing Now

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Broadview’s latest book on English composition, Academic Writing Now: A Brief Guide for Busy Students by David Starkey, invites the student reader to write throughout—and all over—its pages. Many students write in their books as a method of memorization: textbooks are a haven for highlighters; grammar guides have lines for filling out exercises; a favorite novel is dog-eared and marked up in pencil.…

The Rules of the Game

An Excerpt from The Grasshopper, Third Edition, by Bernard Suits In this passage, the Grasshopper explores the possibility of playing a game without any rules. Ivan and Abdul [I began] had been officers of general rank before each was retired and ‘elevated’ to the post of ambassador in the backwater capital of Rien-à-faire. Both had…

The Value of Poetry

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I’m writing this time about poetry. To my mind, one of the most unfortunate trends of recent years is the decline in poetry sales for university and college courses. (Yes, I do have Broadview’s interests at heart here, but it’s more than that—really!) Increasingly, instructors have turned away from assigning anthologies of poetry or individual…

Broadview Author Mark Schwartz Discusses CSR

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Mark S. Schwartz, Associate Professor of Law, Governance, and Ethics at York University, sat down for an interview with the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies to discuss his research in business ethics and the publication of Corporate Social Responsibility: An Ethical Approach (Broadview Press, 2011).

BEs are Special

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There are many competing editions of most of the Broadview Editions (BEs) published by Broadview Press. Our main competitors are usually Penguin, Norton, Oxford, and Modern Library. It is crucial to the success of the BE series that we maintain not just a competitive price with these publishers (as we do) but also a distinctive…

Philosophizing About Games

What exactly are games, and why do we play them? Ludwig Wittgenstein famously used the concept ‘game’ to illustrate what he called ‘family resemblance’—the idea that some things don’t have a single, defining characteristic. Some games are amusing, some games are competitive, and some games require a board, but not one of these traits is…