exclusives
Teaching the Eighteenth Century: A Series of Poster Presentations
Introduced by John R. Iverson & Diane Duffrin Kelley
The group project assembled here was originally part of an initiative generated in the context of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Beginning with the 2009 meeting, held in Richmond, Virginia, each year we have organized a poster session devoted to "Teaching the Eighteenth Century," with the goal of promoting active, informal conversations focused on this important aspect of our professional lives. Take a look at the collection . . .
features
The Futures of Eighteenth-Century Studies
Paula Backscheider
"Teaching eighteenth-century literature has never been easy, and it certainly is not going to become more so. There’s the language, especially for the period before 1740, and it has always seemed to me to require the most interdisciplinary knowledge and skills of any period. ." Read more . . .
Robinson Crusoe, Home School Hero
Margaret Eustace France
"From 1970 to 2006, the only paperback edition of Daniel Defoe’s first sequel to The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), came from an unlikely source: Focus on the Family. The evangelical Christian organization chose to use a Victorian edition as their copy text, to which they made further changes and added an original introduction and reader’s guide." Read more . . .
Ann Campbell
"Despite every conceivable obstacle, including innumerable departmental, college, and university committees seemingly created for the sole purpose of impeding change, both my university’s core curriculum and my department’s literature curriculum have in the span of the last two years been dramatically revised, or “reformed” as the university refers to the process, for the first time in thirty years." Read more . . .
Reading Daniel Defoe in Twenty-First Century American High School Textbooks
Elizabeth Zold
"Early in the semester, a student in my course on eighteenth-century British women’s travel narratives stated that Jane Austen should be on the syllabus because Austen 'wrote old literature too' . . . " Read more . . .
pedagogies
Satire as Gateway: Introducing Undergraduates to Eighteenth-Century Literature
Jeanine Casler
"Who among us has not experienced resistance from non-majors due to what some feel is the linguistic oddity of many works of the period, or their apparently occasional nature—the fact that many literary pieces of the time seem to be inextricably bound to the era in which they were written, with too many references to things, people, and events that today are far from familiar. The reading of a forty-line poem, I am often told by a frustrated student, can turn into a two-hour footnote-reading session . . ." Read more . . .
Reviews
Defoe's America, by Dennis Todd
Reviewed by Noel Chevalier
"As everyone knows, Daniel Defoe’s best-known novels, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, feature extended involuntary sojourns in the Americas for their title characters. These sojourns effect spiritual transformations that allow for these characters to enact their own redemptions. Read this way, as they often have been, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders reveal themselves to be as much spiritual allegories in the manner of Pilgrim’s Progress as they are adventure or crime novels." Read more . . .
Defoe’s Footprints: Essays in Honour of Maximillian E. Novak, edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher
Reviewed by Scott Nowka
"The cover of Defoe’s Footprints, with its reproduction of a nineteenth-century illustration of Robinson Crusoe’s iconic footprint scene, might suggest that this collection is solely concerned with that novel. This would be appropriate in a festschrift for Maximillian Novak, since he has single-handedly set the terms of much serious scholarly treatment of Defoe’s best-known novel. But the plural in the title emphasizes that there is more under consideration here: it recognizes that Daniel Defoe's contribution to letters goes far beyond Robinson Crusoe and acknowledges the wide-ranging work of the scholar that best helped us realize this fact." Read more . . .
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, edited by G.A. Starr and Linda Bree
Reviewed by Jessica L. Hollis
"In 2009 Oxford World’s Classics re-issued its edition of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the first time since 1998. Such a multi-year gap between press printings of literary classics is to be expected. So I was quite surprised to see that Oxford was coming out with this imprint edition yet again in 2011, a mere two years later." Read more . . .
