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Anna Powell and Andrew Smith (eds), Teaching the Gothic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), ISBN: 1-4039-4929-8 hb, ISBN: 1-4039-49301 pb, 214 pp. +xxi, £16.99 pb, £55.00 hb.
As the co-editor of another volume of essays with an almost identical title, Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction (MLA, 2003), I was more than a little intrigued to read and review the current volume, the latest offering in Palgrave's series 'Teaching the New English', published in conjunction with the English Subject Centre. While reading this book, however, I often felt that I was looking into a mirror darkly, while that refrain from 'Let's call the whole thing off' kept running through my head: 'you say tomato and I say tomato.' Although I know that the contributors to this volume teach the same texts that I do for the most part, and although we conduct research in the same areas, I was struck often by the very different worlds we inhabit. Each of us has produced a volume of teaching essays that speaks to the realities of the classroom situations that we know, but clearly we know very different pedagogical contexts. While this volume is situated in the UK (only three of the thirteen contributors are American), the MLA volume is very decidedly an American production, produced by and intended for American teachers of the Gothic. Because the differences are so striking in how we structure our instruction, I will focus on those distinctions and then suggest some commonalities that I think we both could or should share.
In their Introduction to the volume, Powell and Smith state that their intention is to 'take a different approach' from the MLA volume to assembling a collection of essays on Gothic pedagogies:
Some of the contributors examine how changes in intellectual history have impacted on curriculum design and so influenced what (and how) we teach. The early chapters address how developments in criticism and theory have shaped our approach to teaching the Gothic (5).
One of those 'changes' in canon formation seems to be the foreboding status of F.R. Leavis, who is mentioned twice as a sort of dark presence who demonised the Gothic with his 'great tradition' approach to literary texts (2; 10). His presence in the USA was and is not...