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When the knight Adelbert leaves his beloved Adelheit for the Crusades, her father arranges for her to marry the rich and powerful Robert von Rastenberg, whom she does not love. Several years later, while strolling through the forest, Adelheit encounters her former lover, who has returned to persuade her to run off with him. Torn between her love for Adelbert and her honor and duty as wife, Adelheit chooses to remain with Robert, but her manipulative stepson, Franz, hungry for his father’s love and his inheritance, conspires to trick Adelheit into fleeing—and precipitates a series of events that end in tragedy.
Purporting to chronicle historical events, Eleonore Thon’s play reveals more about the changing roles of women at the dawn of the Industrial Age than it does about knightly conduct in the German Middle Ages. Published in 1788 and translated here for the first time in English, Adelheit von Rastenberg will be of interest to students of German literature, comparative literature, women’s studies, and theater.
Responses to a survey conducted for this volume indicate that most teachers of Blake begin with Songs of Innocence and of Experience; the work is included in the syllabi of courses on literature and poetry at all levels, as well as courses in religious studies, humanities, and composition. The book’s continuing fascination can be attributed to the many intellectual, theoretical, and pedagogical challenges it presents for students and teachers alike, such as the particulars of Blake’s language and punctuation, his use of illustrations, differences in the order of the poems among the various extant editions, and considerations of what—for Blake and for other poets—constitutes “writing” and “the book.”
This Approaches volume, like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions and anthologies, critical works (including a survey of available commentaries on each poem), background materials, and facsimile and microfiche reproductions. In the second part, “Approaches,” distinguished teachers and scholars describe strategies for presenting the Songs in the classroom. The first four essays discuss how teachers can bring theoretical concerns, such as textual and feminist approaches, to bear on specific poems. The following four essays address the inclusion of Songs in particular classes, from a survey on English Romanticism to a literature course at a technological institute. The third set of essays examines the Songs from specific literary perspectives, such as an analysis of the variations among different editions and an investigation of the work’s biblical foundations. The final four essays present approaches for teaching individual poems.
Long a centerpiece of eighteenth-century literary studies and a significant influence on the fiction of its day, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe remains a standard text for teaching the period and continues to inspire popular adaptations and imitations, from children’s books to adventure films to reality TV. In teaching the work, instructors are challenged to separate the popular images of Crusoe from the text and its two sequels, creating distance from the myth without losing sight of why it is so powerful. Students need guidance in recognizing the way the novel blends genres—romance, travel tale, spiritual biography, diary, economic and political allegory—and in judging the character of Crusoe, a topic that has elicited much scholarly debate. The essays in this volume offer classroom tested strategies that address these and many other concerns.
Part 1, “Materials,” describes the novel’s publishing history, its critical reputation, its fictional predecessors, and its stature as an international text. It also surveys modern editions, scholarly biographies, and relevant Web sites and provides a brief biography of Defoe. Essays in part 2, “Approaches,” focus on genres such as travel writing and conduct books; consider how ideas about individualism, education, science, masculinity, and race helped shape Defoe’s trilogy; trace the themes of the colonial experience in castaway narratives and Robinsonades; and show how the Crusoe story unfolds in later periods, in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Derek Walcott’s poetry, children’s literature, and film.
The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the ’45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel—the romance tradition, Fielding’s legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli—can be adapted to others.
During her long and varied career, Eliza Haywood acted onstage, worked as a publisher and bookseller, and wrote prolifically in many genres, from novels of seduction to essays in periodicals. Her works illuminate the private emotional lives of people in eighteenth-century England, invite readers to consider how women in that culture defined themselves and criticized oppression, and help us better understand the social debates of the period.
This volume addresses a broad range of Haywood’s works, providing literary and sociopolitical context from writings by Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, and others, and from contemporary documents such as advice manuals and court records. The first section, “Materials,” identifies high-quality editions, reliable biographical sources, and useful background information. The second section, “Approaches,” suggests ways to help students engage with Haywood’s work, gain a nuanced understanding of the time period, work with primary documents, and participate in digital humanities projects.
The works of Samuel Johnson—in particular, the famous Dictionary and the Lives of the Poets—have long held a central place in the English curriculum. This volume from the MLA derives its rationale from a different source, however: reports from experienced teachers of Johnson that students truly enjoy reading him. Johnson’s writings can speak directly to students’ concerns about identity and vocation, the role of authority, the relations between the sexes, and the challenge of trying to live according to one’s own ideas. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Samuel Johnson shows the ways successful teachers have used these topics to enliven classroom discussion.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” weighs the merits of various anthologies of Johnson’s works and evaluates the relevant scholarly and critical resources. In the second part, “Approaches,” sixteen contributors offer thematic teaching strategies for use in courses ranging from composition to women’s studies; explore methods of teaching Johnson’s works to nonmajors, particularly in survey courses of British literature or Western civilization; and focus on teaching specific works, both the familiar ones and those that are less well known, including Johnson’s letters, the Soame Jenyns review, and A Journey to the Western Islands.
Pope’s poetry, the editors of this collection suggest, “provides . . . an index to social criticism, to enlightened religious belief, to witty and vivacious writing, and to the bearing of much of the Western literary tradition on the eighteenth-century mind.” Approaches to Teaching Pope’s Poetry strives to make Pope’s genius and versatility shine in the classroom.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” features a survey of useful reference materials as well as recommendations on available editions and anthologies. The essays in the second part, “Approaches,” discuss Pope’s wit and use of satire, his debt to Horace, and his relationship with the Scriblerians; present Pope’s poetry alongside verse and parodies by his contemporaries; and share strategies for teaching individual poems in a variety of courses. Several essays discuss Pope’s influence on the English Romantics, especially Byron and Wordsworth.
The novels of Samuel Richardson can be demanding for the student today because of their focus on virtue, their embodiment of eighteenth-century social conventions, and their sheer length. Although the critical scholarship on Richardson is thriving, there is little work on teaching his novels. This volume turns the challenges of his novels into opportunities for inventive pedagogy.
Part 1, “Materials,” assesses available editions of Richardson’s works; evaluates background materials; and reviews biographies, critical studies, readings on eighteenth-century literature, and Web resources. A survey of experienced instructors identifies successful assignments for both undergraduate and graduate students.
Part 2, “Approaches,” is divided into four sections, one on the background of Richardson’s novels and one each on Clarissa, Pamela, and Sir Charles Grandison. Contributors explore the meaning of religion to Richardson’s characters and to his contemporaries; discuss how his work as a printer influenced the physical appearance of his novels; show how to engage students in the debates about feminism and patriarchal ideology in the novels; and consider why Richardson revised so extensively. Classroom exercises use the Web to compare online editions of Richardson’s novels.
Rousseau is read, literally, all over the world. Given the enormous place autobiographical writing has come to occupy in literary studies, his influence is not surprising. The Confessions, in which Rousseau relates most of the events of his life, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which focuses on his last few years, are his primary contributions to this form, which he essentially reinvented in modern Western literature. Together, the two writings give voice to some of the major political, psychological, literary, ethical, and environmental concerns of our day. This breadth is reflected in the wide spectrum of courses in which Rousseau’s works are taught—courses on great books, world literature, political science, autobiography, travel, and women’s studies, as well as courses at all levels of French studies.
Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching series, this book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” reviews the place of the Confessions and Reveries in Rousseau’s oeuvre, assesses editions in French and translations into English, provides guidance to important background readings and critical studies, and lists an array of audiovisual resources and Web sites devoted to Rousseau. In part 2, “Approaches,” contributors discuss the sources of Rousseau’s confessional writings, explore the new literary mode of autobiography, and consider the problems of the public responses to his work. They also scrutinize particular passages and investigate contemporary critical approaches as well as comparative approaches linking Rousseau to other writers, including Wordsworth and Baudelaire. Rounding out the volume are two useful compendiums—a chronology of Rousseau’s life and an annotated list of his other major works.
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