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When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he reportedly greeted her as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.” To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin serves as a touchstone for the war. Yet few works have been selected to represent the Civil War’s literature, even though historians have filled libraries with books on the war itself.
This volume helps teachers address the following questions: What is the relation of canonical works to the multitude of occasional texts that were penned in response to the Civil War, and how can students understand them together? Should an approach to war literature reflect the chronology of historical events or focus instead on thematic clusters, generic forms, and theoretical concerns? How do we introduce students to archival materials that sometimes support, at other times resist, the close reading practices in which they have been trained?
Twenty-three essays cover such topics as visiting historical sites to teach the literature, using digital materials, teaching with anthologies; soldiers’ dime novels, Confederate women’s diaries, songs, speeches; the conflicted theme of treason, and the double-edged theme of brotherhood; how battlefield photographs synthesize fact and fiction; and the roles in the war played by women, by slaves, and by African American troops. A section of the volume provides a wealth of resources for teachers.
This volume is available for free in these e-book formats:
The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. Wilson’s plays, as they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America’s collective identity.
In part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” the editors survey sources on Wilson’s biography, teachable texts of his plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson’s work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.
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.
Indiana, George Sand’s first solo novel, opens with the eponymous heroine brooding and bored in her husband’s French countryside estate, far from her native Île Bourbon (now Réunion). Written in 1832, the novel appeared during a period of French history marked by revolution and regime change, civil unrest and labor concerns, and slave revolts and the abolitionist movement, when women faced rigid social constraints and had limited rights within the institution of marriage. With this politically charged history serving as a backdrop for the novel, Sand brings together Romanticism, realism, and the idealism that would characterize her work, presenting what was deemed by her contemporaries a faithful and candid representation of nineteenth-century France.
This volume gathers pedagogical essays that will enhance the teaching of Indiana and contribute to students’ understanding and appreciation of the novel. The first part gives an overview of editions and translations of the novel and recommends useful background readings. Contributors to the second part present various approaches to the novel, focusing on four themes: modes of literary narration, gender and feminism, slavery and colonialism, and historical and political upheaval. Each essay offers a fresh perspective on Indiana, suited not only to courses on French Romanticism and realism but also to interdisciplinary discussions of French colonial history or law.
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.
Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the discourse of human rights has expanded to include not just civil and political rights but also economic, social, cultural, and, most recently, collective rights. Given their broad scope, human rights issues are useful touchstones in the humanities classroom and benefit from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural pedagogy in which objects of study are situated in historical, legal, philosophical, literary, and rhetorical contexts. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies is a sourcebook of inventive approaches and best practices for teachers looking to make human rights the focus of their undergraduate and graduate courses.
Contributors first explore what it means to be human and conceptual issues such as law and the state. Next, they approach human rights and related social-justice issues from the perspectives of particular geographic regions and historical eras, through the lens of genre, and in relation to specific rights violations—for example, storytelling and testimonio in Latin America or poetry created in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Essays then describe efforts to cultivate students’ capacity for ethical reading practices and to deepen their understanding of the stakes and artistic dimensions of human rights representations, drawing on active learning and experimental class contexts. The final section, on resources, directs readers to further readings in history, criticism, theory, and literary and visual studies and provides a chronology of human rights legal documents.
A philologist and medieval scholar, J. R. R. Tolkien never intended to write immensely popular literature that would challenge traditional ideas about the nature of great literature and that was worthy of study in colleges across the world. He set out only to write a good story, the kind of story he and his friends would enjoy reading. In The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien created an entire world informed by his vast knowledge of mythology, languages, and medieval literature. In the 1960s, his books unexpectedly gained cult status with a new generation of young, countercultural readers. Today, the readership for Tolkien’s absorbing secondary world—filled with monsters, magic, adventure, sacrifice, and heroism—continues to grow.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” introduces instructors to the rich array of resources available for teaching Tolkien, including editions and criticism of his fiction and scholarship, historical material on his life and times, audiovisual materials, and film adaptations of his fiction. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” help instructors introduce students to critical debates around Tolkien’s work, its sources, its influence, and its connection to ecology, religion, and science. Contributors draw on interdisciplinary approaches to outline strategies for teaching Tolkien in a wide variety of classroom contexts.
A prolific and enduringly popular author—and an icon of American fiction—Jack London is a rewarding choice for inclusion in classrooms from middle school to graduate programs. London’s biography and the role played by celebrity have garnered considerable attention, but the breadth of his personal experiences and political views and the many historical and cultural contexts that shaped his work are key to gaining a nuanced view of London’s corpus of works, as this volume’s wide-ranging perspectives and examples attest.The first section of this volume, “Materials,” surveys the many resources available for teaching London, including editions of his works, sources for his photography, and audiovisual aids. In part 2, “Approaches,” contributors recommend practices for teaching London’s works through the lenses of socialism and class, race, gender, ecocriticism and animal studies, theories of evolution, legal theory, and regional history, both in frequently taught texts such as The Call of the Wild, “To Build a Fire,” and Martin Eden and in his lesser-known works.
This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s Don Quixote highlights dramatic changes in pedagogy and scholarship in the last thirty years: today, critics and teachers acknowledge that subject position, cultural identity, and political motivations afford multiple perspectives on the novel, and they examine both literary and sociohistorical contextualization with fresh eyes.
Part 1, “Materials,” contains information about editions of Don Quixote, a history and review of the English translations, and a survey of critical studies and Internet resources. In part 2, “Approaches,” essays cover such topics as the Moors of Spain in Cervantes’s time; using film and fine art to teach his novel; and how to incorporate psychoanalytic theory, satire, science and technology, gender, role-playing, and other topics and techniques in a range of twenty-first-century classroom settings.
In the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Latin American authors found themselves writing for a new audience in both Latin America and Spain and in an ideologically charged climate as the Cold War found another focus in the Cuban Revolution. The writers who emerged in this energized cultural moment—among others, Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), José Donoso (Chile), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Manuel Puig (Argentina), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)—experimented with narrative forms that sometimes bore a vexed relation to the changing political situations of Latin America.
This volume provides a wide range of options for teaching the complexities of the Boom, explores the influence of Boom works and authors, presents different frameworks for thinking about the Boom, proposes ways to approach it in the classroom, and provides resources for selecting materials for courses
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