Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period

Initiated in 1980 with a volume devoted to the Canterbury Tales, the Modern Language Association's "Approaches to Teaching" series now offers over six dozen volumes. Still dominated by the single-work, single-author method that early on was its exclusive mode, the series has more recently begun to show signs that the literature curriculum has begun to work in different ways. In addition to recent volumes, for example, devoted in the old manner to Teaching Toni Morrison's Novels and Teaching Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman', there are new volumes on Teaching Literature and Medicine and Teaching the Literatures of Early America. Indeed, these latter volumes apparently rest so uneasily with the "Beowulf to Virginia Woolf" method of the main list that MLA has shuffled them over into a new sub-series, "Options for Teaching."

I confess that I'm still trying to puzzle out the difference between "Approaches to Teaching" and "Options for Teaching." Just when I figure that the "Options" series was created to edge away from the Nobel Prize mentality of the main list, MLA plunks an aggressively canon-busting volume, -Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period-, in the "Approaches" series. The plain irony is that almost all of the arguments in this new volume call into question the assumptions on which the series in which it appears was originally based--and that continue to govern it in large part. The British eighteenth century, for example, is represented in the "Approaches" series by a surprisingly small set of volumes--Gulliver's Travels (1988), Pope's Poetry (1993), Tristram Shandy (1989), and Works of Samuel Johnson (1993)--that could be a (tiny) snapshot of the curriculum a half century ago. Romanticism at least has received more extensive coverage. The "Approaches" series currently offers volumes devoted to each of the six high-canonical Romantic male poets, plus volumes on Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein. But the new volume is up to something very different. Instead of awarding posthumous McArthur Grants, it directs our attention to a gallery of neglected names: Seward, Barbauld, Baillie, Smith, Robinson, Williams, Tighe, More, Yearsley, Hemans, Landon, and many others. My favorite irony of this profitably turbulent professional moment is that the MLA, in its T-shirt and tote-bag mode (Manhattan office rent is steep, after all), is offering a boxed set of seven Romantic-period "Approaches" volumes--the Big Six poets, plus Anna Seward et al. That box strikes me as a telling image of a professional wish that the old and the new dwell happily (and quietly) together, like a set of pledge-break coffee mugs with amusing caricatures of Famous (and Not So Famous) Writers.

The twenty-nine short essays collected in British Women Poets supply numerous tips to avoid the trap of thinking of canon-revision as a zero-sum game: the more Seward, the less Shelley; the more Baillie, the less Byron. Judith Pascoe, for example (who has done much to return the poetry of Mary Darby Robinson--the "Perdita" of Prince Regent fame--to our attention), offers helpful "Strategies for Replacing the Six-Poet Course," and Donelle Ruwe supplies a piece on "Women Romantics in a Poetry Survey Course." The book is organized according to a template common to all the "Approaches" volumes: first, a detailed and useful survey of teaching and research materials by the volume co-editor, Harriet Kramer Linkin (elsewhere the champion of Mary Tighe), followed by sections on "Approaching the Texts," "Literature and History: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives," "Teaching Individual Poets," and "Specific Course Contexts and Strategies." Although a few of the important figures in the recovery of forgotten women's Romantic writing are not directly represented here (Jerome McGann, Marlon Ross, J. R. de J. Jackson, and, among the anthologists, Duncan Wu and Andrew Ashfield), the book otherwise supplies a strong sample from the most productive critics and theorists in the field: Susan Wolfson, Anne Mellor, Stuart Curran, Paula Feldman, Julie Ellison, Greg Kucich, Catherine Burroughs, and the volume's other co-editor (and driving force), Stephen Behrendt. Although many of the essays pinpoint the undergraduate curriculum (Deborah Kennedy on "Introducing Felicia Hemans in the First-Year Course," Becky Lewis on "The Appeal of the Domestic in the First-Year Course"), it should be noted that this volume, unlike the "Approaches" series generally, also pitches itself at the graduate curriculum: in Behrendt's words, "the essays present approaches to teaching the women poets in advanced graduate courses and introductory courses for undergraduate non-majors and at institutions ranging from Ph.D.-granting research universities to community colleges" (23).

In terms of research opportunities for both graduate students and undergraduates, some of the most useful essays focus on the technology of writing and publishing. Paula Feldman, for example, in "How Their Audiences Knew Them: Forgotten Media and the Circulation of Poetry by Women," stresses how our reading of poetics in the period needs to attend to the cultures of song performance, manuscript commonplace books and albums, and literary annuals--and notes how the recovery of these materials can enliven and energize a classroom. In a similar vein, Glenn T. Dibert-Himes supplies at the end of the volume a piece on "Sight, Sound, and Sense: L. E. L.'s Multimedia Productions," to follow which readers need to know about not only trochees and tropes but also DAT recorders and flatbed scanners. Indeed, some of the most lively work in the field is currently found at the intersection of our own digital technologies and the various production technologies of Romanticism. Linkin's survey of research materials does an excellent job of pointing to the various web resources available at the time--but her print vehicle can't supply hypertext links, and of course there has been an explosion of splendidly useful Web resources just in the couple of years since this volume was prepared. I can't get around this conclusion: the kinds of praiseworthy professional assistance provided by the "Approaches to Teaching" series are FAR better accomplished on the Web, where the best of the old can be easily archived and accessed as it is regularly updated by new essays, new databases, new resources, and new links. Print is simply a very clumsy and inefficient vehicle for an ongoing professional conversation about what works in the classroom. The place to go for the very latest on Romantic period teaching was unavailable in 1997: Laura Mandell's Romantic Pedagogies pages, regularly updated, at the Romantics Circles website: http://www.rc.umd.edu/features/pedagogies/. To put it bluntly: the "use by" date on "Approaches to Teaching" volumes often expires before they ever get on the shelf.

Such a conclusion should not be read as denying the utility of the essays in this volume--my point is simply that, like these reviews, they could be even more useful in a different medium. Going back and looking at any of the "Approaches" volumes published in the 1980s has the curious effect of witnessing a pedagogical and professional moment frozen in time--and often as lifeless. Just as these volumes set themselves the impossible task of arresting the temporality of our teaching lives, so they also exhibit a curious rhetorical feature that I'll close by remarking. Reading an "Approaches" volume cover to cover is a discouraging experience to this unevenly successful teacher: all of the students in the book, page after page, class after class, are "amazed," "fired up," "delighted," "energized," and on, and on, and on. There's not a dullard among them. Peter Manning (bless him!) in the 1986 "Approaches" volume on Wordsworth broke the mold and contributed an essay "On Failing to Teach Wordsworth." With all the snapshots of Gold Medal classroom moments, I for one would like to hear more about the stragglers at the back of the pack--who were, after all, dear to the hearts of Romantic writers, men and women alike.