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Called the great poet of America by the writer Max Eastman in 1943, Walt Whitman has in the past few decades secured a largely unchallenged place in the literary canon. Yet, as Donald D. Kummings notes in his preface to this collection of essays, Whitman “often suffers from the treatment accorded many another major author—that is, readers approach him dutifully, reverentially, as an exhibit in a wax museum rather than as a poet of living relevance. This volume attempts to suggest ways in which teachers may vitalize Whitman and his Leaves for present and future generations of students.”
Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this book is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” evaluates the many editions of Leaves of Grass, recommends student reading, and surveys reference and critical works, background and pedagogical studies, and audiovisual aids. In the second part, “Approaches,” nineteen teachers explore subjects and issues central to Whitman studies, including biographical concerns, literary relations, philosophical perspectives, elements of language and style, narrative techniques, prosodic innovations, and interpretive strategies.
John Fowles presents a remarkable translation of a nineteenth-century work that provided the seed for his acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman and that will astonish and haunt modern readers.
Based on a true story, Claire de Duras’s Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the time of the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race—and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman who feels “cut off from the entire human race.” As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe.
A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras’s peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine; the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist; and, as Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, “the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind.”
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.
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.
“Few poets are as congenial to undergraduates as Keats,” write the volume editors. But they warn that if the poetry and the life and character of the poet are attractive and accessible, there is more to Keats than at first meets the eye.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” reviews works on Romanticism and on Keats, editions of Keats, critical studies, various other reference materials, and audiovisual resources. It also gives reading lists for students, the poems most frequently taught, sample assignments, and a subject index of the poet’s letters. The second part, “Approaches,” contains sixteen essays gathered into three groups: classroom strategies, to help students interact with the poems; theoretical approaches, which all have a practical classroom dimension; and thematic orientations, including myths, death, images of women, and the problem of imagination. “If there is any single characteristic that mediates the diversity of these essays,” write Walter Evert and Jack Rhodes, “it is clearly the abhorrence of interpretive closure in teaching.” The collection attempts to present a balanced spectrum of the ways that Keats is taught.
Since its publication over a century ago, A Doll House has often been narrowly read as a single-thesis play—as a commentary on women’s rights. Recent scholarship and criticism, however, suggest multiple interpretations of Ibsen’s most famous work; teachers of A Doll House can profit from these new perspectives and lead their students to an appreciation of many different aspects of the play.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” analyzes the faults and merits of the many available translations of A Doll House and recommends background materials and supplemental readings for both teachers and students. The second part, “Approaches,” samples many ways to teach the play in the classroom. The first three essays show how to incorporate the play into introductory courses on literature and composition; the following four essays focus on teaching the play in more advanced classes on dramatic literature. The remaining seven essays present specific strategies, such as using feminist approaches, examining performances of the play, and comparing A Doll House to Ibsen’s other plays in a graduate seminar.
As the volume editor, Frederick W. Shilstone, explains in his preface, this book originated in hallways, at conferences, and in classrooms, with colleagues and students “who share my enthusiasm for Byron yet consider his works, especially when taught in survey courses, problematic.” Aimed at instructors teaching Byron for the first time as well as those more experienced who wish to explore new methods of presentation, this volume attempts to keep classroom discussion lively and engaging.
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 editions and anthologies, bibliographies, scholarly studies, teaching aids, films, videos, and musical performances. The second part, “Approaches,” gathers twenty-three essays by instructors with extensive experience in teaching Byron. Using a wide range of critical strategies, the contributors explore philosophical, textual, biographical, social, historical, and aesthetic issues in Byron’s poetry. The essays also confront problems that complicate the teaching of Byron—the poet’s use of various poetic guises, his personal intrusions into the poems, and the question of Byron’s place among his contemporaries. The collection focuses on the works most frequently taught in undergraduate courses and includes six essays devoted to Don Juan.
According to the editors of this collection of essays, Madame Bovary is “arguably the greatest novel of nineteenth-century France.” It “raises key issues in human relations, ethics, and social justice, as well as problems concerning the use and misuse of language, novelistic structure, tone, and figurative expression in literature.” Twenty Flaubert scholars show how they present this rich material to students in a variety of courses and settings, using methods that balance aesthetic (text-centered) and cultural (society-centered) studies.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews French and English editions of Madame Bovary and background materials useful to students and teachers. In the second part, “Approaches,” teachers examine the novel’s social milieu; offer course plans based on a variety of methodologies (including thematic, feminist, traditional humanistic, and deconstructionist approaches); and describe how to teach Madame Bovary in courses on film studies, world literature, and writing.
Taught more frequently than any of Charlotte Brontë’s other novels, Jane Eyre presents distinct problems for the contemporary undergraduate instructor, one being the work’s sheer length. Almost all the instructors who responded to a survey conducted for this volume spent two to three weeks teaching the novel in their courses and seminars; their students discovered, in the words of the volume coeditor Diane Long Hoeveler, “as much about themselves, their own memories of childhood, their own struggles for autonomy, as they [did] about the cultural, social, economic, religious, and literary backgrounds that constitute the milieu of the novel.”
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” discusses editions, relevant background and critical studies, biographies, bibliographies, and other aids to teaching. In the second part, “Approaches,” twenty contributors discuss Brontë’s background and biography; the influence of Christianity, fairy tales, and Gothic fiction on her work; the themes of the novel and its social and political implications; its film and stage adaptations; relevant artworks (paintings, etchings, and portraits); and various theoretical approaches to teaching the book.
Old Goriot is not only the most read of Balzac’s works but also one of the most commonly taught of all French novels. This collection of essays, as the editor says, offers “fresh interpretations that reflect on and revise the critical tradition.” It thus conveys a sense of what Balzac’s realist novel may mean to students and teachers more than a hudred and fifty years after its first publication.
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