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Shelley’s poetry, admits Steven E. Jones in the Keats-Shelley Journal, has proved “difficult to study and to teach well.” The essays in Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s Poetry confront the problem of introducing Shelley in the classroom and propose a variety of techniques for engaging students with Shelley’s extraordinary stylistic and conceptual variety.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” evaluates teacher and reference editions of Shelley’s works and surveys secondary readings for both students and instructors. The second part, “Approaches,” contains thirty-two concise and practical essays on teaching the poetry. Six essays discuss pedagogical issues, including teaching Shelley to sophomores and in writing-across-the-curriculum courses. The longest section of the book comprises eighteen essays on presenting individual texts, from reading Adonais as pastoral elegy to teaching Alastor and Prometheus Unbound alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Essays on specific literary and historical contexts and on critical perspectives, including a feminist reading of Shelley’s works and strategies for teaching Shelley with other Romantic poets, complete the volume.
One of the most widely taught medieval English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight still provides many challenges for teachers. What is the best way to explain to students its alliteration and unusual stanzaic form? Why does the poet begin with the fall of Troy? On what Arthurian tradition is the author drawing? Would the lady’s behavior have been conventional in the Middle Ages? Why does Arthur’s court laugh in the end—is the poem a comedy? In this volume, twenty-four teachers offer strategies for successfully presenting the perplexities of Sir Gawain in a variety of courses.
Like other books in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys materials useful to classroom instruction, such as translations, anthologies, reference works, and teaching aids. Part 2, “Approaches,” begins with background essays on teaching the poem within the traditions of romance, chivalry, courtly love, religion and law, and medieval aesthetics. The essays that follow discuss ways to include the poem, both in translation and in the original, in courses ranging from freshman composition to graduate seminars. A final section includes ideas that can be adapted to any class—from reading the poem aloud to sponsoring a medieval banquet.
Laurence Sterne never would have imagined, according to the volume editor Melvyn New, “that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy would two hundred years later be read in classrooms and endorsed by professorial types.” Yet this formidable and great novel is indeed “swimming down the gutter of time,” as Sterne prayed it would. The nineteen essays here, written by experienced “professorial types” who teach at a variety of levels, prove that Sterne is an author whose comic wit must be taken seriously and whose novel students can learn to appreciate and enjoy.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions of Tristram Shandy, other primary works, biographical resources, background studies, and critical commentary. In the second part, “Approaches,” teachers—including both nonspecialists and well-known Sterne scholars—suggest strategies for presenting the novel in courses ranging from English literature surveys (where Tristram Shandy might be taught) to seminars on the eighteenth-century novel (where Sterne’s work must be taught).
Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World—more commonly known as Gulliver’s Travels—is rightly considered one of literature’s great satires. Many students, however, regard the book as children’s literature and Swift himself as a misanthrope. Teachers face the additional challenge that inexperienced readers will be overwhelmed by the book’s unfamiliar political and historical landscape. The essays in this volume of the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series help instructors deal with the enormous amount of background material incorporated into Gulliver’s Travels, the book’s seeming lack of structural and thematic unity, the author’s often ambivalent attitude toward his “hero” and the peoples and creatures Gulliver encounters during his voyages, and the essence of Swift’s satire.
The first of the two parts of this volume, “Materials,” reviews classroom editions of Gulliver’s Travels, required and recommended student readings, audiovisual materials, and background and biographical works for instructors. The second part, “Approaches,” offers strategies, by twenty teachers, for presenting Swift’s work in a variety of settings. Fourteen essays suggest different methodologies for introducing the text to students—such as considering whether Gulliver’s Travels is a novel and using Swift’s letters to reveal the “real” author. The final six essays propose specific assignments for students, from performing dramatic readings to writing satires.
A central figure of the English Romantic movement and the author of scores of canonical works, William Wordsworth is a mainstay of literature courses ranging from freshmen surveys to upper-level seminars. The essays in this collection discuss teaching the poet in these and other settings, using a variety of critical perspectives and pedagogical strategies.
This Approaches volume, like others in the MLA series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys editions, anthologies, student readings, reference works, background studies, and critical scholarship. Part 2, “Approaches,” comprises thirty essays by experienced instructors, beginning with two personal reflections on how Wordsworth courses have changed since the 1950s and on how rewarding teaching the poet can be. Thirteen essays focus on specific works, including Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, the Immortality Ode, and selected sonnets. Eight position the poetry in historical, literary, or theoretical contexts. Other contributions describe ways of teaching Wordsworth at a two-year college, along with the visual arts, or in a modern poetry course.
“Candide is probably the most frequently taught work of French literature,” writes Renée Waldinger, yet “students are often misled by the apparent simplicity of the tale.” The challenge for the teacher, then, is to guide student reading in a way that reveals the richness of the text and the depth of its comic aspect. Responding to this challenge, twenty-four experienced teachers of Candide offer their reflections on the tale, examine its humor, provide crucial historical and philosophical background information, review varying interpretations, and discuss specific teaching strategies.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” surveys essential references, including critical and biographical studies and works on historical and intellectual contexts, and evaluates French and English language editions of Candide. In the second part, “Approaches,” teachers describe how they present Voltaire’s classic work, offering practical ideas for a variety of disciplines and on different levels, from freshman writing courses to graduate seminars.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is both a literary work very much rooted in its age and a cultural artifact that transcends period. “Undeniably one of the great and influential works of the English Romantic period,” writes the editor, Stephen C. Behrendt, the novel provides “an excellent vehicle for introducing students to the complexities of Romantic art and thought.” At the same time, as this volume demonstrates, Frankenstein is often studied in college and secondary school courses focusing not on Romanticism but on science fiction, Gothic fiction, women’s literature, or film and popular culture.
The book, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions of Frankenstein, discusses reference and critical works and recommended reading for students, and lists selected film versions of the novel. In the second part, “Approaches,” instructors present classroom strategies for teaching the novel. The essays are divided into four groupings: general issues (e.g., choosing a text, gender and pedagogy, language and style), contexts of study (e.g., biography, Romanticism), course contexts (e.g., science fiction, women’s studies, composition), and Frankenstein and film.
“The Faerie Queene,“ according to Alexander Dunlop (coeditor of the present volume), “may be the most undervalued classic in the canon of English poetry.” The epic poem’s archaic language, formal structure, historical references, and literary allusions all present special challenges to both student and teacher—challenges that the contributors to this book believe can be overcome with creativity and wit. Designed for beginning instructors as well as for specialists still looking for the lesson plan of their dreams, Approaches to Teaching Spenser’s Faerie Queene offers a thorough discussion of recent work on Spenser and on the social and cultural milieu of Elizabethan England.
This Approaches volume, like others in the series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys resources useful for classroom instruction (such as editions, anthologies, and student readings), reviews background studies and critical scholarship, and reprints eight illustrations related to the poem. Part 2, “Approaches,” presents six essays suggesting methods for introducing The Faerie Queene to students and nine essays describing advanced classroom strategies incorporating a variety of topics, including the visual arts, feminism, and colonialism.
Using the now controversial designation metaphysical as a term to be debated or dissected, this book helps teachers with the classroom process of discriminating among the metaphysical and other poems of five important seventeenth-century poets: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions of the poems, anthologies, recommended readings for students, aids to teaching, reference works, and background studies. The second part, “Approaches,” presents essays by eighteen teachers in three sections. The first section deals with general discussions and backgrounds, addressing such important topics as seventeenth-century love poetry, religion, iconography, and representations of women in metaphysical poetry. Another group of essays explores various course contexts, including lower- and upper-division survey courses and a humanities-based composition course. The final section presents essays focusing on each of the five poets.
When The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, Irving Howe called it “the most exciting piece of new fiction” produced in the decade. Throughout this complex novel, Doris Lessing invites the reader to contemplate the fragmentation of modern life, to grapple with conflicting elements in order to see the world anew. The novel touches on a variety of themes—including African history, leftist politics before Stalin’s death, trends in psychoanalysis, the effects of war, male-female relations, and madness—and has attracted a wide range of critical and pedagogical approaches.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” evaluates the corpus of scholarly and critical material published on the novel and recommends background reading. In the second part, “Approaches,” seventeen essays place the novel historically, politically, philosophically, and aesthetically—examining it in such contexts as Lessing’s life, Jungian psychology, modernism and postmodernism, feminism, film theory, and musical forms—and discuss the teaching of The Golden Notebook in different times, circumstances, and classrooms.
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