Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Middlemarch
Editor(s): Kathleen Blake
Pages: ix + 187
Published: 1990
ISBN: 9780873525343 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780873525336 (hardcover)
"A monument to dozens of teachers' love for their students and for a book they love to teach."
Studies in English Literature
"Middlemarch," writes Kathleen Blake, "is the great Eliot novel, the one to teach, because it has the kind of appeal that can carry students forward toward becoming people who will return to it." Taught to undergraduates in introductory surveys as well as in specialized upper-division courses, Middlemarch presents challenges to both teachers and students--in its length, its rich philosophical and psychological insights, its range of characters, its historical scope, its multiple plots and dense style. The sixteen essays in Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Middlemarch describe imaginative ways experienced teachers have dealt with these challenges to share their love of the novel with their students.
Like other books in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Materials," surveys editions of Middlemarch, background readings on the Victorian period, textual and critical studies, and audiovisual aids. In part 2, "Approaches," contributors describe specific strategies for teaching the novel. Among the topics discussed are critical trends in the classroom (e.g., narrative theory, deconstruction, feminist criticism, reader-response analysis), teachers' responses to student difficulties with the novel, textual and contextual perspectives, and ways instructors overcome curricular and institutional constraints. The volume also offers a chronology of the writing and publication of Middlemarch, a genealogical chart for its large cast of characters, and an extensive bibliography.
Table of Contents
Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Middlemarch
PART 1: MATERIALS
Kathleen Blake
Editions
- Readings for Students
- Biography
- Background on the Victorian Period
- Textual and Critical Studies
Other Works by George Eliot
Bibliographies and Journals
- Readings for Teachers
- Biography
- Background on the Victorian Period
- Textual and Critical Studies
Audiovisual Materials
PART 2: APPROACHES
Some Critical Trends in the Classroom
Before We Go in Depth: A Narratological Approach
Robyn R. Warhol
Teaching Middlemarch as Narrative
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth
Recon/Decon/Structing Middlemarch
Baruch Hochman
Teaching Middlemarch: Close Reading and Theory
J. Hillis Miller
"Incarnate History": The Feminisms of Middlemarch
Suzanne Graver
Considering the Reader's Situation
A Fuller Sort of Companionship: Defending Old-Fashioned Qualities
Merritt Moseley
Reading Middlemarch in Installments As Victorian Readers Did
Carol A. Martin
Reading Middlemarch, Then and Now
Janice Carlisle
Focusing on the Text, Expanding the Context
"A Microscope Directed on a Water-Drop": Chapter 19
Juliet McMaster
Relative Truths: Character in Middlemarch
Elizabeth A. Campbell
Old Age in Middlemarch
David Moldstad
Middlemarch, Bleak House, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Course
Alison Booth
Middlemarch and the Modern American Student: Making the Cultural Leap
Rosemary T. VanArsdel
Conclusions: Considering the Teacher's Situation
"The Very Nature of a Conclusion"
Stanley Tick
Really Reading Middlemarch in a Community College
Valerie Bystrom and Michael Kischner
A Novel "Written for Grown-Up People": Middlemarch in the Undergraduate Classroom
Jeanie Thomas
Appendixes
Chronology of the Writing and Publication of Middlemarch
Middlemarch Genealogy
Works Cited
Index
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