Prepared by editors whose scholarship fuses literary and composition studies, Making Literature Matter combines a comprehensive writing text with a uniquely organized anthology for introductory literature courses that emphasize critical and academic writing. What makes literature matter?Writing about it — argumentatively. The writing text helps students learn to analyze literature and develop responsible and persuasive claims about it — making it matter to them as it hasn’t before. Reading it — when it explores issues that matter. The stories, poems, plays and essays in the anthology are uniquely organized into thematic clusters focusing on life issues that speak to students and evoke their engaged response.