Approaches to Teaching Sand’s ‘Indiana’ ed. by David A. Powell, Pratima Prasad (review)

This excellent introduction to George Sand’s Indiana (1832) comprises twenty-one short essays by a range of scholars. As highlighted in the Preface, Indiana is now the Sandian novel most consistently taught at universities worldwide, not only in women’s-writing courses and surveys of French literature but also in courses on French history, comparative literature, and colonial writing. In this first compendium of teaching resources on the novel, leading Sand critics and other specialists of nineteenth-century culture provide clear, succinct explorations of the text grouped into four broad themes: ‘History and Geography’, ‘Race, Femininity and Masculinity’, ‘Comparative Perspectives’, and ‘Literary Contexts’. One of the strengths of the volume is its consistent emphasis on the depth and richness of Indiana, which can be read as a way in to so many aspects of nineteenth-century French culture, from questions of representation, gender, class, and race, to social history and conceptions of space and time. Topics reaching beyond nineteenth-century France are also explored, such as the Enlightenment, or English translations of the text. Françoise Massardier-Kenney’s chapter, for example, offers useful tips on teaching the text in translation, and food for thought on literary translation more broadly. Many essays also rightly emphasize Sand’s stylistic innovations, especially with regard to the narratorfigure and the portrayal of character. Some contributions are more helpful than others in terms of providing practical advice on specific activities to be carried out in class. Isabelle Naginski’s piece is especially good in showing how one episode at the beginning of the novel can be used to elucidate numerous ‘paths of critical assessment’ (p. 100). Nigel Harkness’s essay, which nicely complements Aimée Boutin’s analysis of masculinity, also provides some excellent suggestions for studying the novel’s complex narrative voice. The collection will prove useful for scholars teaching Indiana for the first time but also provides plenty of new insights for those long familiar with the text. Particular highlights include Patrick Bray’s spatial approach to the novel; Peter Dayan’s rich reading of power relations; Lynn Penrod’s chapter on the legal context; and Kate Bonin’s refreshing intertextual comparisons. Shira Malkin’s inventive strategies for engaging students through theatrical performance are also inspirational. The study provides a number of useful electronic resources in addition to a wide-ranging bibliography, but one minor complaint is the fact that the index is restricted to names. Certain key issues such as slavery, the creole figure, and narration, are discussed in several chapters (this is one of the collection’s strengths), and it would have been helpful to provide a quick and easy means of locating the relevant pages. The volume might also have been enriched by more interdisciplinary readings connecting the text with the visual arts, medicine, or the natural sciences. Total coverage, however, is not the aim here, but rather, to provide ‘a variety of approaches and materials that will enhance [the] teaching of Indiana and contribute to students’ understanding and appreciation of the novel’ (p. 16). In this regard, the collection is a great success.