Although the characters speak English, Anne Bronte's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" explores interactions among representatives of different speech communities. The protagonist, Helen Graham, moves through communities differing enough from hers to create misunderstandings. Her difficulties can be clarified through Hymes' model of the speech…

Aubrey Beardsley's involvement with the literary magazine, "The Yellow Book," is described. While there were some other literary magazines published before "The Yellow Book", its issues are distinguished because they were the first to deliberately present visual art work (and the visual artist) as equally important as…

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…

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…

By examining two autobiographies by Victorian women, the role of editors in the composing and publishing of autobiographical texts can be explored, and questions can be raised about the way personal writing is assigned, edited, and evaluated in classrooms today. The autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, a prolific Victorian novelist and critic, was…

Because of its wide range of justifiable interpretations, Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is an appropriate novel to use to help students become better critical readers. Scholarly criticism continues to debate the topic of Tess's character, yet recent feminist and deconstructionist approaches, as well as recently published…

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…