Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions

by Diane Long Hoeveler (Editor)

This resource for educators describes various approaches for teaching Gothic fiction. The volume opens with reviews of available editions, anthologies, reference works, background sources, critical studies, films, and Web sites. The second section contains 28 essays examining the genre's connections to history, philosophy, feminism, and social criticism and exploring common themes, such as entrapped heroines and animated corpses. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

310 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays mostly about actual courses people have taught, so it's mostly rather dry, factual reporting of practical applications of various kinds of pedagogy to the Gothic. (The stand-out exception was the guy who brilliantly made his class of non-majors write an epistolary novel together.) I found it interesting mostly because I want to incorporate more Gothic in my teaching (although even there, I would have preferred at least partial focus on more modern Gothic, instead of the one essay about teaching Anne Rice and Stephen King*). I mean, it's an MLA book, I should not be surprised that the approach is, ahem, conservative. (And I did appreciate Tamar Heller pushing the boundary with her essay on teaching race, gender, and imperialism in Victorian Gothic.)

So, yeah, not of interest unless you really are interested in teaching 18th and 19th century Gothic. (Or, of course, Anne Rice and Stephen King.)

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*Because of which, I think, all the other essays in the book, when they mention modern Gothic/horror, do so as if "Anne Rice and Stephen King" is a suitable synecdoche for the whole shebang (instead of just two examples of an extraordinarily diverse genre) which is the kind of superficial understanding I was actually hoping a book about teaching the Gothic would not have.