Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Editors: Kevin R. Binfield, William J. Christmas
- Pages: 360
- Published: 2018
- ISBN: 9781603293488 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603293471 (Hardcover)
“What makes this book such a valuable resource for instructors . . . is that it identifies how the teaching of this material both intersects with, and can depart from, approaches used to teach other historically noncanonical fields such as women’s writing and writing by racial minorities.”
—Journal of British Studies
Behind our contemporary experience of globalization, precarity, and consumerism lies a history of colonization, increasing literacy, transnational trade in goods and labor, and industrialization. Teaching British laboring-class literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means exploring ideas of class, status, and labor in relation to the historical developments that inform our lives as workers and members of society. This volume demonstrates pedagogical techniques and provides resources for students and teachers on autobiographies, broadside ballads, Chartism and other political movements, georgics, labor studies, satire, service learning, writing by laboring-class women, and writing by laboring people of African descent.
Theresa Adams
Corey E. Andrews
Jennifer Batt
Misty Beck
Stephen C. Behrendt
Florence S. Boos
Scarlet Bowen
Emily M. Brewer
Vincent Carretta
Alexis Easley
Steven Epley
Cassandra Falke
Stacey Floyd
Sara Hackenberg
Gary Harrison
Monica Smith Hart
Moyra Haslett
Bridget M. Keegan
Aruna Krishnamurthy
Margaret A. Loose
Anne Milne
Ellen L. O’Brien
Katie Osborn
Kathryn Meehan Quinto
Mike Sanders
James R. Simmons, Jr.
Meagan Timney
Miriam L. Wallace
Fiona Wilson
David Worrall
Timothy Ziegenhagen
Introduction: Laboring-Class Literature and Its Contexts, 1700–1900 (1)
Part I: Teaching Genres
Teaching the Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Georgic (27)
Singing Chambermaids and Walking Gentlemen: Teaching Romantic-Era British Theater (34)
Nineteenth-Century Broadside Ballads and the Poetics of Everyday Life (43)
Teaching the Aesthetic in Working-Class Fiction (51)
Teaching Laboring-Class Autobiographies as Condition-of-England Texts in the Victorian Survey (57)
Urban Mysteries, Chartist Novels, and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Popular Narrative (64)
Part II: Teaching Selected Authors and Works
Rubbing Shoulders with Mary Leapor: Class Curricula as Anthologization (75)
Poeta Nascitur, Non Fit: Teaching Ann Yearsley’s Life and Works (85)
“’Tis Pity a Genius Should Be So Deprest!”: Elizabeth Hands’s Verse Satire and the Literary Marketplace (93)
Teaching Christian Milne (100)
Teaching the Politics and Poetics of Land through William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (107)
Teaching James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (117)
John Clare’s “Rich Disorder” (126)
Teaching Chartist Poetry (134)
Part III: Pedagogical Strategies
Teaching Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Poetry Using a Labor Studies Approach (143)
The Laboring-Class Atlantic (150)
Using Romantic-Era Laboring-Class Poets to Explore Cultural Archaeology (159)
Thomas Holcroft and Literary Ventriloquism (168)
Teaching the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic War Era through Sailor Memoir (177)
Teaching the Theme of Leisure (186)
Wandering in Fact and Fiction: Wordsworth’s Wanderer and Christopher Thomson (194)
Poetry of the People? Working-Class Poetry and Victorian Periodicals (202)
Teaching Chartist Fiction with Canonical Texts: Pairing Thomas Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (211)
Teaching Laboring-Class Writers as Victorian (219)
Life Study in and beyond Mary Peach Collier’s Poetic Effusions (227)
Part IV: Types of Courses
“The Poet’s Rapture, and the Peasant’s Care”: A Service-Learning Course on Eighteenth-Century British Laboring-Class Verse (239)
“All Bedlam, or Parnassus, Is Let Out”: Teaching Laboring-Class Poets in the Eighteenth-Century Survey Course (246)
The Working Lives of Eighteenth-Century Authors of African Descent (255)
“That Agricultural Poetry Class”: Teaching Rural Laboring-Class Poets, 1750–1850 (265)
Writing Rural: Agrarian and Georgic Transformations in Smith, Wordsworth, Bloomfield, and Clare (274)
Teaching the Poetry of Victorian Working-Class Women (282)
Part V: Resources
General Resources (295)
Annotations for Two Major Databases (297)
Supplementary Resources for Some Essays in This Volume (301)
Paintings (313)
Recordings and Sheet Music (313)
Notes on Contributors (315)
Works Cited (319)
Index (341)
“[A] very rich volume, full of good ideas and likely to be of great value to instructors and scholars. I was impressed by the inventive and imaginative methods the contributors described to teach this fairly new topic.”
—John Goodridge, Nottingham Trent University
