Search Modern Language Association
Log in to Modern Language Association
When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Vénérande becomes enamored of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule’s suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.
Critics of Austen’s Emma have remarked on both its pleasures and its difficulties. Teachers seeking to introduce Austen’s intricate, subtly crafted world to new readers often find that students are put off by the novel’s seeming lack of action and preoccupation with the details of daily life. This volume in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching series outlines the specific challenges of teaching Emma and shows teachers how to construct lectures, initiate classroom discussions, and devise writing assignments that illuminate for first-time readers the novel’s many layers of meaning, its hospitality to different interpretations, and the sheer delights of reading and rereading the book.
Elsa Bernstein lived at the center of Munich’s cultural life from the 1890s into the next century. Her literary salon was frequented by such authors as Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodor Fontane, Henrik Ibsen, and Thomas Mann. Her plays, written under the pseudonym Ernst Rosmer, are noteworthy for their unconventional female figures, uninhibited language, taboo subjects, and realistic detail. Susanne Kord, the editor and translator of Twilight, discusses the reception of Bernstein’s works—at first enthusiastic, then increasingly sexist—and the theme, in Twilight, of the culturally sanctioned oppression of women.
In this naturalist drama, a woman eye surgeon treats the daughter of a man who is prejudiced against educated women. Her successful treatment wins the father’s affection for her, and they fall in love. She is ready to give up medicine for wedded bliss—her wish is to become “very happily stupid”—but finds misery instead.
Elsa Bernstein lived at the center of Munich’s cultural life from the 1890s into the next century. Her literary salon was frequented by such authors as Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodor Fontane, Henrik Ibsen, and Thomas Mann. Her plays, written under the pseudonym Ernst Rosmer, are noteworthy for their unconventional female figures, uninhibited language, taboo subjects, and realistic detail. Susanne Kord, the editor and translator of Dämmerung, discusses the reception of Bernstein’s works—at first enthusiastic, then increasingly sexist—and the theme, in Dämmerung, of the culturally sanctioned oppression of women.
Although rarely found on college syllabi just two decades ago, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is (according to an MLA survey) one of the most frequently named additions to nineteenth-century American literature courses. The inclusion of this political, sentimental, and incredibly popular novel introduces a host of issues to the classroom: the novel’s place in the canon of women’s literature, the historical importance of its commercial success, the status of Stowe’s work as “good” literature, and—perhaps the greatest challenge to teachers—the topic of race.
This volume, like others in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews available editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, biographical works, historical materials, works of criticism, and audiovisual resources. The seventeen essays in the second part, “Approaches,” suggest teaching strategies that spotlight the novel’s literary and historical context, recent debate and controversy, and current theoretical and critical methodologies. Because the issue of race tends to dominate any attempt to teach or discuss the novel, a number of essays address the racism that pervades Stowe’s best-known work.
Recent decades have seen a revival of scholarly interest in Gothic fiction. Critics are attracted to the genre’s exploration of irrationality, to its dark representation of the bourgeois family and of the psychological effects of social conflict. Because of this critical interest and because of the enduring popularity of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, the Gothic has become increasingly visible on college syllabi.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” gives information on available editions, anthologies, reference works, background sources, critical studies, films, and Web sites of value in teaching Gothic fiction. The second part, “Approaches,” contains twenty-eight essays that define the genre; examine its connections to history, philosophy, feminism, social criticism; show its different forms in England, Ireland, the United States; and probe its themes—including such motifs as ghosts, castles, entrapped heroines, and animated corpses.
Among the many authors discussed are Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is probably the most often taught nineteenth-century Russian novel in the American academy. Teachers have found that including this virtuoso work of art on a syllabus reaps many rewards, especially in courses that connect texts thematically (e.g., Adultery in the Novel) or theoretically (e.g., Russian Literature into Film, Theory of Narrative). It also stirs up heated classroom discussion—on sex and sexuality, dysfunction in the family, gender roles, society’s hypocrisy and cruelty. But because of translation and transliteration problems, the peculiarity of Russian names and terms, the unfamiliarity of Russian geography and history, and the very size of the novel, teaching it presents challenges.
This volume, the seventy-eighth in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching series, provides a comprehensive resource for dealing with these difficulties. The introduction contains a section on the complicated issue of names in Anna Karenina and another on the setting: time and space in the novel, Moscow versus Petersburg, the Russian country estate, travel, the railroad. Part 1, “Materials,” discusses and evaluates English translations and Russian editions of Anna Karenina and recommends works in the critical literature. In part 2, “Approaches,” twenty-two seasoned instructors of the novel describe their classroom experiences and suggest ways of introducing students to this powerful work; topics include ideas in Anna Karenina, agrarian issues, Tolstoy’s antiphilosophical philosophy, Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky, Anna’s dreams, and the reader’s moral education.
Adolphe Belot was the envy of his contemporaries Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert: his books, unlike theirs, were best-sellers. He specialized in popular fiction that provided readers with just the right mix of salaciousness and propriety. (Under the initials A. B. he dispensed entirely with propriety.)
The sensational Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife (published in 1870 with a preface by Zola) tells of the suffering of a naive young man whose new bride will not agree to consummate the marriage. Eventually he learns from an acquaintance, to his amazement, that their wives are lovers. In the pitched battle between husband and wife, the sexes are evenly matched—until the end.
Christopher Rivers argues in his introduction that the protagonist’s homophobic attitude toward lesbianism is ironically linked to his intimate homosocial bonds with men. This example of commercial fiction, Rivers argues, reveals tensions in nineteenth-century French society not apparent in canonical works of high culture.
The sensational Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (published in 1870 with a preface by Zola) tells of the suffering of a naive young man whose new bride will not agree to consummate the marriage. Eventually he learns from an acquaintance, to his amazement, that their wives are lovers. In the pitched battle between husband and wife, the sexes are evenly matched—until the end.
View Cart