Addresses the problems in discussing nineteenth-century British literature in the classroom and advocates encouraging students to take and support various interpretations of text. (DF)

Discusses the largely negative image of African Americans in U.S. literature. Predicts that the genteel censorship against African-American male writing--which has existed since African-American male writers began putting forth new unwelcome images of African-American people--will inevitably, eventually end and a new image of African-American…

By critically reading Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes," geography students can learn about the major beliefs, values, and fears of late Victorian England. The geographical scope of the work is discussed, as well as what the work tells us about beliefs concerning nature, environmental influence, and human nature of the period. (RM)

Provides an eight-day sequence of assignments to introduce the idea of the speaker or "persona" to a high school English class beginning study of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature. Cites works by Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, and William Blake. (HTH)

An approach to teaching French literature that uses a Jules Verne novel published only in 1994 is described. The novel, "Paris in the 20th Century," is the basis for a series of written and oral exercises about the novel, its social and cultural context, the author, and the actual changes that have occurred in Paris in comparison with…

Poetry of the romantic age is often uninviting to students, leaving them puzzled because they do not sense the connections between the poetry and themselves. Yet, much romantic poetry can be enjoyed and comprehended if approached in terms of some personal, reflective, and connective readings. Wordsworth and Whitman are often avoided because they…

Recommends using "antique" adolescent literature as a way of stimulating student interest. Cites several examples of nineteenth century literature that can be so used. (JL)

A Mount Holyoke College course on gender and the development of modern fiction focused on the novel in eighteenth-century France, emphasizing women writers, writings about women, and the application of modern feminist criticism to the genre. (MSE)

Texts from a variety of genres (letter, narrative, biography, film scenario, and dialogue) and a variety of French authors of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries are provided as examples of discourse with the common theme of passion and as sources for the study of the semiotics of passion. (MSE)

Students need to be made comfortable with the "foreign" language of British English before they can fathom the range of and changes in English literature through the centuries. In one approach to college English, students spend most of the first semester studying nineteenth century novels. After having studied four such novels, each for between…

Although it is rare to see French literature in the French civilization syllabus, it is relatively easy to incorporate short stories into the course which allow for quick reading and discussion. It is best to choose the best writers, who communicate the spirit of the time in which they wrote, from the point of view of the artist rather than the…

This teacher's guide was developed for the third of four courses in Valencia Community College's Interdisciplinary Studies program, a 2-year core general education curriculum which chronologically examines the major developments in the evolution of human knowledge. The guide provides an introductory overview of the course's topic (i.e., Western…

Presents a class activity that uses the dime novel in a critical mode as an avenue to increase student's knowledge of the concepts and themes of women's experiences during the nineteenth century. Provides background of the dime novel. Asks students to compose their own dime novel, and provides a student handout that outlines the process. (RW)

This annotated bibliography is offered as a resource tool for literary scholars, historians of science, and historians of ideas. Annually since 1939, a bibliography of scholarship on the relations of literature and science has been compiled by the Modern Language Association. The present bibliography incorporates the work of the annual…

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…