Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House

Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House
Author: John O. Jordan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2008
Genre: Education
ISBN:

A central text both in Dickens's career and in the history of the novel itself, Bleak House provides students and teachers occasion to discuss Victorian social concerns involving law, crime, family, education, and money and to learn about every stratum of English society, from the aristocracy to the homeless. But the sheer size of the novel and its narrative intricacy pose pedagogical obstacles. The essays in this volume offer instructors an array of practical strategies for use in the classroom: some describe courses organized exclusively around Bleak House; others offer ideas for teaching a single scene or topic in the novel. The book opens with part 1, "Materials," which assesses editions and provides a guide to the wealth of resources available to instructors, including reference works, critical studies, and background readings, in print and on the Web. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," discuss nineteenth-century British culture and Victorian social texts; present ways to teach specific scenes, patterns, and problems in the novel; describe intertextual approaches; and detail specific courses taught in different settings and at a variety of educational levels.

Supposing Bleak House

Supposing Bleak House
Author: John O. Jordan
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2011-02-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813930928

Supposing "Bleak House" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens’s and nineteenth-century England’s greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel’s retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novel’s narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens’s life during the years 1850 to 1853. Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esther’s complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens’s seldom-studied A Child’s History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx.Supposing "Bleak House" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a "popular" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding
Author: Jennifer Preston Wilson
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 160329225X

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.

Approaches to Teaching Austen's Mansfield Park

Approaches to Teaching Austen's Mansfield Park
Author: Marcia McClintock Folsom
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603291997

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 addresses the controversies of its time more than Austen's earlier novels did. 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.

Approaches to Teaching The Plum in the Golden Vase (The Golden Lotus)

Approaches to Teaching The Plum in the Golden Vase (The Golden Lotus)
Author: Andrew Schonebaum
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2022-07-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1603294139

The Plum in the Golden Vase (also known as The Golden Lotus) was published in the early seventeenth century and may be the first long work of Chinese fiction written by a single (though anonymous) author. Featuring both complex structural elements and psychological and emotional realism, the novel centers on the rich merchant Ximen Qing and his household and describes the physical surroundings and material objects of a Ming Dynasty city. In part a social, political, and moral critique, the novel reflects on hierarchical power relations of family and state and the materialism of life at the time. The essays in this volume provide ideas for teaching the novel using a variety of approaches, from questions of genre, intertextuality, and the novel's reception to material culture, family and social dynamics, and power structures in sexual relations. Insights into the novel's representation of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, legal culture, class, slavery, and obscenity are offered throughout the volume.

Teaching Transatlanticism

Teaching Transatlanticism
Author: Linda K Hughes
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2015-02-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 074869448X

The 18 chapters in this book outline conceptual approaches to the field and provide practical resources for teaching, ranging from ideas for individual class sessions to full syllabi and curricular frameworks.

The Victorian Literature Handbook

The Victorian Literature Handbook
Author: Alexandra Warwick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2008-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441126422

The Victorian Literature Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the Victorian period. It is a one-stop resource for literature students, providing the essential information and guidance needed from introducing the historical and cultural context to key authors, texts and genres. It includes case studies for reading literary and critical texts, a guide to key critical concepts, introductions to key critical approaches, and a timeline of literary and cultural events. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary research and current and future directions in the field lead into more advanced topics and guided further reading enables further independent work. Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of nineteenth century literature.

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Author: A. Maunder
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2015-12-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230281265

This book brings together the experiences of Anglo-American teachers and discusses some of the challenges which face teachers of nineteenth-century fiction, suggesting practical ways in which these might start to be overcome by considering the constantly changing canon, issues related to course design and the possibilities offered by film and ICT.

Telling Stories / Geschichten erzählen

Telling Stories / Geschichten erzählen
Author: Carsten Gansel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2012-02-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 311026868X

The essays collected in this volume highlight the narrative as a phenomenon inherent in human nature. They examine the likely purpose of artistic and literary expression and its contribution to survival in an early human environment. They also consider the developing interest in shaping experience through the narrative, and investigate the consequent significance of traits acquired throughout the ages for the production and reception of texts. In doing so, the book provides a highly diverse overview of the latest research and debates in this innovative field of research.

Articulating Bodies

Articulating Bodies
Author: Kylee-Anne Hingston
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1789624959

Articulating Bodies shows how Victorian fiction’s narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality.