Moskall, Jeanne and Wooden, Shannon R. (Eds) (2005).Teaching British Women Writers, 1750-1900. Reviewed by Susanna Calkins, Northwestern University

Moskall, Jeanne and Wooden, Shannon R. (Eds) (2005).Teaching British Women Writers, 1750-1900. NY, NY: Peter Lang. Pp. ix + 235         ISBN 0-8205-6927-0 Reviewed by Susanna Calkins Northwestern University May 14, 2007 As the works of British women writers have steadily been recovered and celebrated in recent years, new questions about women writers’ liminality have been raised, not just by the departure from the traditional male-dominated canon, but by the implications of that departure when teaching with little known or previously dismissed texts in the classroom. The essays in TeachingBritish Women Writers, 1750-1900, collectively address the pedagogical and institutional issues faced by feminist scholars, at a range of institutions and institutional types, who have sought to reshape the canon and student aesthetics by introducing the voices of British women writers into their courses. As other scholars have long argued, editors Jeanne Moskal and Shannon Wooden contend that recovering and integrating previously silenced writers into the curriculum helps expand and revise the canon, while simultaneously reconstituting the meaning of ‘literature.’ More significantly, they suggest that the liminality of women writers produces a different “teacherly self,” which in turn invites new teaching strategies and pedagogical opportunities in the classroom. Teaching British Women Writers seeks to move recovery work forward in several ways. The essays help revise, broaden, and critique the existing canon, demonstrating to others, especially students long exposed only to the literary ‘greats,’ a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the world that produced those greats, by exploring the cultural production of contemporary women writers. Indeed, how the contributors deal with the ongoing defiance from the students about the evolving nature of the canon comprises one of the most compelling aspects of this volume. Professors like James R. Simmons and David E. Latané ask their students to question what it means for a text to be “great” or “popular” and to consider why some texts have been heralded and canonized while others have been marginalized or silenced. Such questions help their students rethink often fixed perspectives and aesthetics forged by the traditional canon, and, in turn, to reconsider how gender is contextually situated in space and time, constructed by cultural, social, and political forces. The essayists describe a wide range of strategies to broaden their students’ context and knowledge of a given period. Kristine Svenson uses Satthaianadhan’s Saguna, a narrative of empire, to explore how gender and identity are complicated by imperialism and coloniality, even though she speaks of her students as a collective sharing one perspective and one voice. For Rebecca Shapiro, early nineteenth-century conversionist tracts and pamphlets not only expand the canon, but serve to contextualize evangelical literature aimed at Jewish women in a way that frames Great Britain’s creation of empire. She also brings to light the multivocal nature of women’s participation in politics, an enterprise that helps students acquire a more nuanced perspective of the period. Rick Incorvati effectively challenges his undergraduates to rethink received constructions of gender and sexuality by examining the intimate communications and friendships among eighteenth and nineteenth century women. Moreover, the contributors offer models for including women writers into the curriculum, describing their methodological and pedagogical approaches with varying degrees of effectiveness. While this volume does not purport to be a how-to manual, essays by Kathryn T. Flannery, Elizabeth Dolan and Gina Luria Walker stand out in the collection for their detailed descriptions of class activities designed to promote learner-focused teaching and to enhance student learning. Less effectively, Lawrence Zygmunt appears to take a more teacher-centered approach to the course, transmitting his ideas and knowledge of Victorian multiplot fiction, and remaining distant from his actual students and their reception to the texts. Other contributors, like Patricia L. Hamilton, reflect on what it means to teach non-canonical works that lack the scholarly scaffolding and staging—critiques, commentaries, and readily available texts—that offer weight, credibility and justification to the more common canonical texts. Teaching non-canonical works also means that the traditional role of the teacher as the expert with knowledge and insight must be upended, in favor of a more collaborative learner-centered approach in which the students can take the lead in interpreting and commenting on a text. Students, even as novice learners, thus become the experts. For Hamilton, it was essential that her undergraduates learn to evaluate the interpretive judgments of literary critics—teaching them to scrutinize literary criticism for biases, value judgments, inferences and assumptions—in order to develop their critical thinking abilities. Hamilton’s approach is particularly notable because she is teaching a skill that should translate across disciplines. Catherine Burroughs offers another well-intentioned, but questionably structured, pedagogical innovation intended to promote her students’ sense of critical inquiry. Towards the end of her course, she asks her students to consciously reflect on what they have learned about the way scholarship is done in the field of Romantic women playwrights, and their impressions of the field (and its evolution). In the questionnaire (provided as an appendix), students are asked to assess the impact of course activities on their learning and their understanding of the field. Unfortunately, the actual questions focused more on what details the students could recall about the texts and authors, rather than on what concepts they may have learned in the course or skills they may have developed. While the responses may provide her with some insight into what students thought about the course, a better designed instrument would more clearly assess student learning and critical thinking. Nevertheless, instructors would do well to follow her lead in consciously attempting to gauge student learning in their courses. Other instructors deliberately designed teaching activities to confront the resistance—both active and passive—found among students exposed to British women writers, by allowing the students to become the experts through primary source research. By letting go of the traditional ‘teacher as expert’ model, students could discover for themselves, through their own scholarship, why noncanonical authors are not simply tokens or symbols tacked onto a syllabus, but rather are vital parts of the literary and historical landscape. Peaches Henry, often faced with students who resented having to read “unimportant” women, devised a substantial research project that addressed their implied question: how important could these women be if the Norton anthology deemed them too insignificant for inclusion? Although Henry did not ask or expect her students to champion their authors, a transformation in attitude occurred nonetheless. As Henry explained, “In addition to appreciating the hardships associated with researching these writers, students began to realize the critical respect these writers had garnered from their contemporaries and, at the same time, to question why these women had been excluded from the canon of Victorian nonfiction prose” (p. 172). E.J Clery took this recovery effort even farther, showcasing her students’ expertise by having them contribute their research to a specialized database. In the most extreme example, Beth Sutton-Rampseck and her honors student, Nicole Meller Beck, collaboratively edited Mary Ward’s novel Marcella, casting aside the traditional hierarchical teacher-student model in favor of a more egalitarian model in which each partner has an equal voice. These essays underscore the value of introducing undergraduates to primary source research, so they can learn for themselves why so many women have been excluded from the canon and what can be done to counteract that trend. William Thesing also turns an underlying challenge into a virtue, by asking his students to answer a question that has plagued his teaching for years: “What is a male professor—“the Other”—doing in front of a women’s studies classroom?” By having his students answer questions like these in formal written assignments, students could confront their own biases and perceptions of the meaning of women’s studies. Such reflection helps facilitate an open dialogue about who can and should teach women writers, and how, ultimately to get a fuller, broader view of a literary period. Whether looking for new pedagogical or methodological approaches to teaching non-canonical authors, or simply seeking new ways to move recovery work forward, scholars of women’s and literary studies, as well as instructors across the humanities and social sciences, will find Teaching British Women Writers an invaluable resource. About the Reviewer Susanna Calkins, Ph.D. is a Senior Program Associate at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, where she conducts research on faculty development. She also lectures in history at Lake Forest College (Lake Forest, IL).