Reading skills : the politics of literacy in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "Reading Skills: The Politics of Literacy in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries" is committed to uniting teaching and research in the same conversation. The project interweaves three elements: extensive nineteenth-century archival records from British working-class and pre-professional reading communities, close readings of Victorian novels, and reflections on the experience of teaching those novels in the diverse landscape of the twenty-first-century American classroom. Droge argues that the work of Charles Dickens and George Eliot enabled their readers to navigate social and academic systems of increasingly specialized literacies. She first analyzes the literacy networks formed in over sixty Mutual Improvement Societies (small informal reading groups often hosted by churches) in London and northwestern England from the 1830s-90s, with particular attention to the way these societies read Dickens. Droge activates this reception history to perform her own analyses of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Our Mutual Friend and argues that Dickens's novels allowed readers to adopt flexibly-literate personas to foster social ties across communities with varied levels of education. She then recovers the importance of George Eliot's novels for first-generation college students at the Mason Science College in 1880s Birmingham and claims that Eliot resonated with students because of her refusal to specialize. Through readings of The Mill on the Floss and Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Droge demonstrates that Eliot's literary use of evolutionary discourse provided a model for students seeking to evade the strict boundaries of emergent academic disciplines, even while extracurricular literary culture effectively enabled a specialized system of scientific education to cohere. Droge closes each section of the dissertation with a lesson plan, using her teaching experiences to pivot between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and reflect on the continued affordances of Victorian texts to confront specialization in today's reading communities.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Droge, Abigail Marie |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Jarvis, Claire, 1977- |
| Thesis advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Degree committee member | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Degree committee member | Jarvis, Claire, 1977- |
| Degree committee member | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Abigail Marie Droge. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Abigail Marie Droge
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