A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers - Softcover

The most successful reader of its kind, A World of Ideas is ideal for composition instructors who want to introduce their students to some of the world's most important thinkers and their ideas: for example, Niccoló Machiavelli on government, Sigmund Freud on the mind, and Virginia Woolf on feminism. Because students perceive writers such as these as serious and important, they take the writing course more seriously: they learn to read more attentively, think more critically, and write more effectively. But more important, this may be a student's only opportunity to encounter these thinkers. No other composition reader offers a comparable collection of important readings along with the supportive apparatus students need to understand, analyze, and respond to them.

LEE A. JACOBUS is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author/editor of popular English textbooks, among them The Bedford Introduction to Drama, Fifth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005); The Longman Anthology of American Drama; and Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading. He has written scholarly books on Paradise Lost, on the works of John Cleveland, and on the works of Shakespeare, including Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Certainty. He is also a playwright; two of his plays -- Fair Warning and Long Division -- were produced in New York by the American Theater of Actors.