Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park
- Editors: Marcia McClintock Folsom, John Wiltshire
- Pages: xi & 255 pp.
- Published: 2014
- ISBN: 9781603291989 (Paperback)
“Every contributor to this collection of nineteen essays has something fresh to say about the interpretation of Mansfield Park as a teaching text, and in a particularly accessible and clear manner.”
—Jane Austen’s Regency World
There were no reviews of Mansfield Park when it first appeared in 1814. Austen’s reputation grew in the Victorian period, but it was only in the twentieth century that formal and sustained criticism began of this work, which, more than Austen’s earlier novels, addresses the context and controversies of its time. Lionel Trilling praised Mansfield Park for exploring the difficult moral life of modernity; Edward Said brought postcolonial theory to the study of the novel; and twenty-first-century critics scrutinize these and other approaches to build on and go beyond them.
This volume is the third in the MLA Approaches series to deal with Austen’s work (Pride and Prejudice and Emma were the subject of the first and second volumes on Austen, respectively). It provides information about editions, film adaptations, and digital resources, and then nineteen essays discuss various aspects of Mansfield Park, including the slave trade, the theme of reading, elements of tragedy, gift theory, landscape design, moral improvement in the spirit of Samuel Johnson and of the Reformation, sibling relations, card playing, and interpretations of Fanny Price, the heroine, not as passive but as having some control.
Regulus Lynn Allen
Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey
Pamela Bromberg
Julia Prewitt Brown
Laura Carroll
Monica Cohen
Laura Dabundo
Dorice Williams Elliott
Sarah Emsley
Susan Allen Ford
Penny Gay
Peter W. Graham
Lisa Kasmer
Deborah J. Knuth Klenck
Karyn Lehner
Paula Loscocco
Anne Mallory
Kay Souter
Lynn Voskuil
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Editions (3)
Critical Reception (5)
Mansfield Park Films (11)
Digital Resources (15)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction (21)
Classroom Strategies and Approaches
Gifts Always Come with Strings Attached: Teaching Mansfield Park in the Context of Gift Theory (50)
Mansfield Park: Austen’s Most Teachable Novel (60)
Mansfield Park’s Textual Metamorphoses (70)
Suggestions of Desire in Horse Riding, Foxhunting, and Music Making in Mansfield Park (83)
The Price of a Maxim: Plausibility in Fanny’s Happy Ending (90)
Speculation in Mansfield Park (97)
Thinking about Fanny Price and Families
Mansfield Park and the Family: Love, Hate, and Sibling Relations (105)
Questions of Interiority: From Pride and Prejudice to Mansfield Park (116)
Understanding Fanny Price: Close Reading Early Scenes (123)
Ambiguities of the Crawfords (132)
Teaching about Mansfield Park in Literary History and Context
Reading with Mansfield Park’s Readers (143)
Understanding Mansfield Park through the Rehearsals for Lovers’ Vows (155)
The Tragic Action of Mansfield Park (164)
Avenues, Parks, Wilderness, and Ha-Has: The Use and Abuse of Landscape in Mansfield Park (175)
Samuel Johnson and the Morality of Mansfield Park (190)
Reading Aloud in Mansfield Park (202)
Teaching Mansfield Park in the Broader Postcolonial Context
Mansfield Park and the Pedagogy of Geography (208)
“That Was Now the Home”: Nationalism and Imperialism in Mansfield Park (216)
“You Do Not Know Me”: Reformation and Rights in Mansfield Park (223)
Notes on Contributors (233)
Survey Participants (237)
Works Cited (239)
Index (253)
“The scope is admirable, and the volume makes a valuable addition to Austen scholarship and pedagogy.”
—Laura White, John E. Weaver Professor of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
