Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction--论文代写范文精选

很显然,无论是老师还是学生，可以阅读整个大卫或匹克威克王朝的任一时期作品，延长阅读是不公平的。坚持一个不受欢迎的工作，只是因为它已经开始,不允许一个理性运动，而且正在努力培养。下面的essay代写范文继续详述。

Introduction 
In 1921, in a book called English for the English, George Sampson, Secretary of the English Association, set down his recommendations for the teaching of literature. Sampson, a member of the committee that in the same year produced the Report for the Teaching of English in England, under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Newbolt, was a devotee of Matthew Arnold and shared the Victorian sage’s sense that literature was a powerful force for humanizing and civilizing. Sampson thus counselled that “Personal kindness” must guide the teacher and the teacher should think more of his students’ hearts than their heads. But he recognized that enthusing students about nineteenth-century literature was a problem. How to do it? They could be asked to study and imitate passages from Austen and Dickens (“models of structure and punctuation”) but could they be taught to appreciate them? 

Sampson’s advice was as follows: Teachers will have their own views of how to deal with long prose works, a novel by Dickens for example. Plainly, neither teacher nor class can read the whole of David Copperfield or Pickwick in a single term. It is unfair to protract the reading of any work. The class will do much by silent reading but occasionally the teacher will read scenes or passages as a treat – if his reading is not a treat he ought not to be a teacher – and occasionally members of the class will be expected to read to the others. Any book that a class finds “dry” should not be pursued to the bitter end, however sweet the teacher may think it . . . . In fact, the whole idea of compulsion is alien to the world of art. This is certain, that if you make boys read The Fair Maid of Perth when they would rather be reading Ivanhoe you will make them dislike Scott altogether. To persist with an unpopular work merely because it has been begun is to make a discipline of what should be a delight, and to disallow a rational exercise of the taste we are trying to cultivate. We must be ready to try any new adventurous experiment in education; we must be just as ready to scrap our failures. (1921, p. 89)

Ninety years on, and notwithstanding changes in class composition and required reading, many of the anxieties Sampson sought to address still remain. Indeed to log on to that part of the World Wide Web containing “The Victoria Listserv” or the “English Subject Centre” is quickly to realize that there are some questions involved in teaching nineteenth-century novelists that never seem to go away: What, for example, do we teach when we teach nineteenth-century fiction? What do we want students to read? What do we want them to get out of it? How do we encourage them to continue reading? Is there a distinction between what students read for pleasure, as recreation, and the books they study as part of their degree course? Can we teach long novels anymore? What imaginative strategies can be used to develop a more intense engagement with nineteenth-century fiction? 

That these questions seem relevant and worth engaging with is doubly the case when one considers that in most higher education institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, nineteenth-century fiction remains a dominant – if not compulsory – aspect of the English literature curriculum. Although fiction is typically taught alongside poetry and drama as part of a course surveying the nineteenth century, fear of poetry means that for many students – and some teachers – novels and short stories invariably become the cornerstones of their engagement with the period. Given the focus of the present volume, it may seem slightly disingenuous to claim that this is rather apt. Yet such preferences do reflect those of our nineteenth-century ancestors themselves, those voracious readers whose desire for stories saw novel production top 900 titles per year between 1875 and 1886, reaching an incredible 1,618 by 1914 (Hammond, 2006, p. 4). “We have become a novelreading people,” announced Anthony Trollope in 1870, in his lecture “On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement” (1938, p. 94).“Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last- appointed scullery maid . . . 

Poetry also we read and history, biography and the social and political news of the day. But all our other reading put together, hardly amounts to what we read in novels” (p. 108). In London, Mudie’s Circulating Library claimed to dispatch more than 5,000 volumes per day from its swanky headquarters in New Oxford Street (Hammond, p. 28). By the time Trollope died in 1882 from a seizure suffered whilst listening to a reading of F. Anstey’s comic novel Vice Versa – but also worn out by so much writing and reading – a new mass of readers was emerging produced by the compulsory Education Acts introduced between 1870 and 1890. With these new readers came an accompanying expansion in the number of outlets for would-be novelists, notably a flood of new cheap magazines and papers, which gave a central place to serialized fiction and short stories. Novels, as journalist and all-round literary utility-man Frederick Greenwood observed in 1888, had become “ordinary commodities . . . [to] be sold at the drapers, & with pounds of tea” (qtd. in Waller, 2006, p. 61). “Short stories,” likewise, as H. G. Wells recalled, “broke out everywhere.” 

Moreover, there were so many magazines that, as Wells noted, even stories “of the slightest distinction” tended to find an outlet: Kipling was writing short stories, Barrie, Stevenson, Frank Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, “The Happy Hypocrite”; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent; and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewels drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella D’Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham [sic], Arthur Morrison, Marriot Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs (who alone seems so inexhaustible). 

I dare say I could recall as many more names with a little effort. (1913, p. 5) The fact that so many of these “jewels” are no longer remembered (even Wells writing in 1913 seems to have a little difficulty!) says a lot about the way literary canons are formed and constantly change, and which genres are deemed important – the novel, rather than the short story, for instance. Yet even discounting the novels and stories no longer in print or that we don’t know about, it can be difficult to come to grips with the reach and variety of Victorian fiction – let alone determining how best to teach it. Henry James’s famous term for nineteenth-century novels – “baggy monsters” – reflects not only their size and scope, but also their astonishing prevalence and diversity (1935, p. 84). 

It is with the challenges involved in teaching a broad range of nineteenthcentury fictional forms that this collection is concerned. This is a literary world that can be huge and daunting from the perspective of students, yet one that is also important and exciting. Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction includes essays by teachers from the UK, Ireland, the US, and Australia that demonstrate a variety of approaches to teaching novels and short stories while arguing for their relevance. The essays, which offer a mix of theoretical paradigms and practical applications, are the products of a revolution in literary study that has transformed how nineteenth-century fiction is deployed in the classroom. When English literature was introduced as a subject of study at King’s College London in the 1830s and when it was taught at American universities at mid-century, it was believed to be a humanizing force for moral uplift that also provided a sense of national heritage (Showalter, 2003, p. 22). 

Yet, that mission waned over the course of the century until it was refined and strengthened in the 1930s when, as Terry Eagleton explains it, literary studies came into its own: “in the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. . . . English was an arena in which the most fundamental questions of human existence . . . were made the object of intense scrutiny” (qtd. in Showalter, 2003, p. 22–3). This shift in attitude toward the subject of studying literature was due in large part to F. R. Leavis, whose definition of the canon was, at least until the 1970s, the curriculum on which nineteenth-century fiction courses were often based. In The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis famously states that “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad” (1962, p. 9). For Leavis and the Scrutiny group, writing in the aftermath of World War II and searching for literary works that could be used to resist what they saw as the debilitating influence of modern commercial and media culture, these were peculiarly fortifying and wholesome writers whose novels embodied the possibility of a moral art, “significant in terms of that human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life” (1962, p. 10)（essay代写)

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