'The Merchant of Venice' is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both in the theatre and in schools, where it is often used to introduce students to the study of Shakespeare. On one level it can be seen as a romantic comedy, in which love triumphs, and also as a simple tale of good overcoming evil. However, problems soon emerge with both of these interpretations, and in this module you will be exploring different perspectives of the text. This will involve looking at some of the unspoken assumptions of the text and seeing them from different points of view.

This book deals with 'Jane Austen', cultural icon, focusing in particular on the varying ways she has been recreated in biographies, literary criticism and film. A related theme is the nature of the re-creational impulse itself - what is the nature of the fascination with Jane Austen that writers and film makers have had, and why has her work been so frequently appropriated and transformed? Wiltshire identifies two types of re-creation: that which simply attempts to re-present the original text with the priority of being 'faithful' to it, a sort of homage (such as early BBC versions of the novels); and that which attempts to create a new text out of the old, which confronts and sometimes contests the assumptions of the original and by so doing establishes itself as new, a work of art in its own right (such as 'Clueless' and Patrick Rozeme's 1995 film of 'Mansfield Park').

This book is a refreshing antidote to the Bradley, Bloom and Brodie's Notes approaches to Shakespeare. O'Toole begins with the contention that traditional school Shakespeare began in the nineteenth century, "on the playing fields of Eton", as part of a national project designed to instil notions of correct behaviour – shades of Matthew Arnold. He moves from there to try to see Shakespeare as a product of his times, as writing in a period of ferment, upheaval and competing world views (the feudal hierarchy v science/capitalism), and then argues that the tragedies reflect this situation.

Deborah Appleman was a major hit at the combined AATE/ALEA 2002 Perth Conference. She is a teacher educator in the USA and her research has focused on the implementation of literary theory in the secondary English classroom. Her book is devoted to accounts of and strategies for the explicit teaching of reader-response theory, Marxist theory, Feminism and Deconstruction. She presents these theories as 'lenses', which offer different vantage points from which to view texts.