Discusses how the author learned to make a research assistant (RA) a part of the administrative package. Shares her ambition to make available good teaching editions of out-of-print novels by Victorian women writers. Suggests coediting new editions of a literary text with RAs and/or post-doctorate students. (SG)

Illustrates the link between biology and Victorian literature by considering such popular and/or influential writers as Tennyson, Collins, Evans, Lewes, Kingsley, Allen, and Doyle. (CS)

Suggests that class discussions of George Eliot's Middlemarch should focus on students' responses to the social, moral, and psychological problems presented in the novel. Asserts that the novel teaches students important lessons about the limitations of human nature and the impact of internal and external constraints on ideals. (Contains 14…

Intended for college teachers and students of English literature and bibliography, this paper presents a chronology of Victorian poet Robert Browning's life as he wrote the four-volume "murder poem,""The Ring and the Book." The paper begins with Browning's discovery in a Florentine bookstall of "the old yellow book,"…

Thomas Hardy has received great acclaim as a poet and novelist, but his short stories have remained largely ignored with regard to the usual short story "canon." Early reviews of Hardy's stories were mixed, but after his death the tide of critical opinion tended to turn against Hardy's stories. A significant historical factor was the…

One of a series of works aimed at presenting contemporary critical opinion on major authors, this collection includes essays by Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis, Edmund Wilson, Ian Watt, Alan D. McKillop, Reuben A. Brower, Marvin Mudrick, Mark Schorer, Arnold Kettle, Lionel Trilling, Kingsley Amis, Andrew H. Wright, Donald J. Greene, and D. W.…

In her novel "Work," through the character of Rachel and her story, Louise May Alcott confronts many of the issues facing both "fallen" women and the social reformers of her day. Rachel, one of the sisterhood of the fallen, becomes an instrument of social reform after having been the victim of the sham respectability of her…

This bibliography is intended as a convenient guide to scholarship in the field of Victorian fiction for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. The listings are selective, with emphasis on critical works published in the twentieth century. Contents include a preface explaining the guide, followed by the main sections: "Bibliographies,…

The author's doctoral dissertation started out as qualitative research--interviews with beginning women teachers exploring the transition from teacher education into the classroom. She explains why the material could be better conveyed in the form of the bildungsroman, a German term for a novel of formation or education. Chapter five of the…

Argues that there are special problems associated with designing and teaching a course about authors outside of the literary canon. Traces the development of a course on Victorian women writers from initial development difficulties to final thoughts on restructuring the syllabus. Notes works used in the course. (DSK)

Describes the use of George P. Landow's hypertext, "The Dickens Web," in an advanced undergraduate literature class and analyzes its practical and theoretical implications. Debates some of Landow's claims about the ease with which learning from hypertext occurs and examines difficulties encountered in using hypertext in the classroom. (DSK)

In teaching, instruction can focus on literary works as storehouses of emotion that can serve as models of how to communicate emotions to the self and others. To help students identify and articulate what they feel as they read Victorian novels, one instructor asked students to record their emotions in a journal divided with quotes on one side of…

From colonial days onward, colloquial speech was looked down on as inappropriate for serious writing, but with the publication of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," American colloquial style was raised to the level of high art. English teachers should encourage students to build on their own colloquial speech in their writing, rather…

A literature course entitled "The Victorian Illustrated Book: A Marriage of Image and Word," offered at Skidmore College in New York, was designed to help students make connections between art and literature. Based on the premise that illustrations in Victorian books can be "decoded" much like a written text, students were…

Investigates the connection between racism in the public school art curriculum and the ethnocentric ideas of George Zerffi. Zerffi lectured widely and taught art history to future art teachers in England, between 1868 and 1892. Although occasionally brilliant, his views reflected the ethnocentric ideology of Victorian England. (MJP)