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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.
There were no reviews of Mansfield Park when it first appeared in 1814. Austen’s reputation grew in the Victorian period, but it was only in the twentieth century that formal and sustained criticism began of this work, which, more than Austen’s earlier novels, addresses the context and controversies of its time. Lionel Trilling praised Mansfield Park for exploring the difficult moral life of modernity; Edward Said brought postcolonial theory to the study of the novel; and twenty-first-century critics scrutinize these and other approaches to build on and go beyond them.
This volume is the third in the MLA Approaches series to deal with Austen’s work (Pride and Prejudice and Emma were the subject of the first and second volumes on Austen, respectively). It provides information about editions, film adaptations, and digital resources, and then nineteen essays discuss various aspects of Mansfield Park, including the slave trade, the theme of reading, elements of tragedy, gift theory, landscape design, moral improvement in the spirit of Samuel Johnson and of the Reformation, sibling relations, card playing, and interpretations of Fanny Price, the heroine, not as passive but as having some control.
Jane Austen is a favorite with many students, whether they’ve read her novels or viewed popular film adaptations. But Persuasion, completed at the end of her life, can be challenging for students to approach. They are surprised to meet a heroine so subdued and self-sacrificing, and the novel’s setting during the Napoleonic wars may be unfamiliar. This volume provides teachers with avenues to explore the depths and richness of the novel with both Austen fans and newcomers.
Part 1, “Materials,” suggests editions for classroom use, criticism, and multimedia resources. Part 2, “Approaches,” presents strategies for teaching the literary, contextual, and philosophical dimensions of the novel. Essays address topics such as free indirect discourse and other narrative techniques; social class in Austen’s England; the role of the navy during war and peacetime; key locations in the novel, including Lyme Regis and Bath; and health, illness, and the ethics of care.
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.
Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) may be the most influential, and perhaps the greatest, book of lyric poetry in French literature. At once Romantic and modernist, it belongs to both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This volume in the MLA’s series Approaches to Teaching World Literature is the first devoted to a lyric poet who did not write in English, and it seeks to promote the study, teaching, and enjoyment of this intriguing and sometimes troubling French poet.
A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse (Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil]) and prose poems (Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen]). This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and offer compelling and fraught representations of urban expansion, social change, and modernity.
Part 1, “Materials,” surveys the valuable resources available for teaching Baudelaire, including editions and translations of his oeuvre, historical accounts of his life and writings, scholarly works, and online databases. In Part 2, “Approaches,” experienced instructors present strategies for teaching critical debates on Baudelaire’s prose poems, addressing topics such as translation theory, literary genre, alterity, poetics, narrative theory, and ethics as well as the shifting social, economic, and political terrain of the nineteenth century in France and beyond. The essays offer interdisciplinary connections and outline traditional and fresh approaches for teaching Baudelaire’s prose poems in a wide range of classroom contexts.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has long held a high position in the academy and in popular culture. It is taught at levels from high school English to doctoral studies and has been adapted in enough film and television versions that many students who know nothing about the book know who Heathcliff is. Nevertheless it is not an easy novel to teach. Thus in addition to surveying experienced teachers of Wuthering Heights, the editors sought to learn directly from students what in the novel was difficult for them and what worked best in engaging their interest. As a result, the approaches suggested in this volume reflect practices that have proved successful for both students and teachers.
Part 1 of this Approaches volume, “Materials,” surveys and assesses the available editions of Wuthering Heights, identifies editions of other works by Emily Brontë, reviews biographies and other background materials, notes the critical studies most frequently mentioned as useful by instructors, and provides an annotated list of resources on the Internet.
Among the classroom strategies described in part 2, “Approaches,” are the following:
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.
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.
Chekhov’s works are unflinching in the face of human frailty. With their emphasis on the dignity and value of individuals during unique moments, they help us better understand how to exist with others when we are fundamentally alone. Written in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, when the country began to move fitfully toward industrialization and grappled with the influence of Western liberalism even as it remained an autocracy, Chekhov’s plays and stories continue to influence contemporary writers.
The essays in this volume provide classroom strategies for teaching Chekhov’s stories and plays, discuss how his medical training and practice related to his literary work, and compare Chekhov with writers both Russian and American. The volume also aims to help instructors with the daunting array of new editions in English, as well as with the ever-growing list of titles in visual media: filmed theater productions of his plays, adaptations of the plays and stories scripted for film, and amateur performances freely available online.
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