Development of Animal Behavior: An Introduction

Overview:This proposal is for a volume providing commentaries on the main contexts of American literature from 1865 to 1945. The commentaries will focus on major artistic, social, economic, political and other issues important to understanding the literary texts used in undergraduate survey courses dealing with the period. Each commentary will provide appropriately detailed contextual material, indications of how that material generally applies to the texts, and illustrative discussions of how it applies to particular authors and texts. The texts keyed to and historical periods will be those contained in standard anthologies (for the purposes of this proposal, I have used the anthologies published by Norton and Heath).The proposed volume will serve as a study guide for students, bringing together material that they typically think of as "background" or "ancillary" to the literature itself but that, in the past two decades of formal literary study, has increasingly become central. Students typically pick up some piecemeal knowledge of the material contained in the volume through brief and uneven anthology introductions and through the comments of their instructors. Our volume will provide a tight, sustained, selective, readable, interconnected guide to contextual matters that will be shown to have a direct bearing on the study of the literature itself.Yannella, Philip R. is the author of 'Development of Animal Behavior: An Introduction', published 2007 under ISBN 9780631219552 and ISBN 0631219552.