COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY PERCY H. BOYNTON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 824.2 Grit Publisher EDUCATION DEPT. The Athenæum Press PREFACE In working on this textbook I have tried throughout to lead the students direct to the literature, to make the comments simple and intelligible, and to offer help to busy teachers toward the presentation of the subject. I have been guided by my belief that students of high-school age can be much more interested in the content of literature than they can be in the form of it; that they can very easily be bored and mystified by overstress on style and structure; and that they have a natural inclination to connect a work of art with the person who created it and the period in which he lived. But I have tried to make a book which should not be a taskmaster for the student nor a narrow-guage single-track railway for the teacher.. The emphasis is first, last, and always on the literature, to which the book is only an introduction. The attempt has been made to suggest such reading as students can understand, to deal with such phases of it as they can grasp, and to discuss these in language that will not require the use of a dictionary. There are footnotes for technical literary terms, outlines at the heads of chapters to show the way, and corresponding paragraph-heads to tell them where they are at any given point. There are questions to keep in mind as they read the literature, and at the ends of the chapters review questions on the text, on the readings, and on the historical background as indicated in the Chronological Charts and Outlines. No competent English teacher would tolerate for long a textbook which seemed to reduce him to the rôle of a recorder of attendance and a keeper of class records. The final agent in the teaching of literature is the man or woman who presides in the classroom. Yet it should not be forgotten that the 563735 |