ENGL 1302 - Charles Miller's class: Circulating Books for Margaret Atwood

By the end of World War I, the skyrocketing divorce rate in the United States had generated a deep-seated anxiety about marriage. This fear drove middle-class couples to seek advice, both professional and popular, in order to strengthen their relationships. In Making Marriage Work, historian Kristin Celello offers an insightful and wide-ranging account of marriage and divorce in America in the twentieth century, focusing on the development of the idea of marriage as "work." Examining the marriage counseling profession, advice columns in women's magazines, movies, and television shows, Celello describes how professionals and the public worked together to define the nature of marital work throughout the twentieth century. She also demonstrates that the maxim of "working at marriage" often masked important inequalities in regard to men's and women's roles within marriage. Most experts, for instance, assumed that women needed marriage more than men and thus held wives accountable for marital success or failure. Making Marriage Work presents a new interpretation of married life in the United States, illuminating the interaction of marriage and divorce over the century and revealing how the idea that marriage requires work became part of Americans' collective consciousness.

The Marriage-Go-Round illuminates the shifting nature of America's most cherished social institution and explains its striking differences from marriage in other Western countries. Andrew J. Cherlin's three decades of study have shown him that marriage in America is a social and political battlefield in a way that it isn’t in other developed countries. Americans marry and divorce more often and have more live-in partners than Europeans, and gay Americans have more interest in legalizing same-sex marriage. The difference comes from Americans’ embrace of two contradictory cultural ideals: marriage, a formal commitment to share one's life with another; and individualism, which emphasizes personal choice and self-development. Religion and law in America reinforce both of these behavioral poles, fueling turmoil in our family life and heated debate in our public life. Cherlin’s incisive diagnosis is an important contribution to the debate and points the way to slowing down the partnership merry-go-round. From the Trade Paperback edition.

This series of books brings together the best criticism on the most widely read writers, including critical portraits of the most influential English-language writers. Each book contains numerous critical essays by noted scholars of the author.

During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. Accordingly, her choice of fiction in the first edition of her The Story and Its Writer was as notable for its student appeal as it was for its quality and range. And to complement these stories, she introduced a lasting innovation: an array of the writers' own commentaries on the craft and traditions of the short story. In subsequent editions her sense of what works was confirmed as the book evolved into the most comprehensive, diverse -- and bestselling -- introduction to fiction anthology. Instructors rely on Ann Charters' ability to assemble an authoritative and teachable anthology, and anticipate each edition's selection of new writers and stories.