Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding ed. by Jennifer Preston Wilson and Elizabeth Kraft (review)

Back when I was preparing to teach one of my first upper-division courses, I asked an eminent senior scholar for advice on teaching Tom Jones. I was full of questions: How should I break it up and over how many class meetings? Did any threads go over particularly well? Any ideas for assignments that would encourage students both to keep up with the reading and to explore their own lines of interest? To my surprise, he told me that he had never taught the novel, certainly not to undergraduates. Joseph Andrews, sometimes paired with Shamela, taught so well, was much shorter, complemented Pamela, and introduced basically the same major concepts and ideas. His reasons were sound, but nevertheless I forged on and taught Tom Jones—figuring it out as I went along—and I am glad I did. My students loved it (or hated it with an engaged and well-grounded passion); the heft of the book anchored the course; and I received some of my best student writing on the questions it raised.

Still, I could have used this wide-ranging teaching companion, edited by Mss. Wilson and Kraft, back then—and I venture to add that my senior colleague would also have found it useful. One of the challenges of editing a volume in the MLA Approaches series is the diversity of its projected audience, which can include both new and veteran educators, scholars and generalists, faculty teaching surveys or thematically organized courses, and those preparing in-depth, even single-author, courses. The collection confronts this challenge admirably well, offering essays that cover a variety of methodologies and areas of focus across Fielding’s fiction, organized into three sections: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones; and Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia. This is straightforward, and the few questions I had (Might a more robust, stand-alone section on drama have been helpful? Should Joseph Andrews and Shamela be paired, since they are so often taught, and published, together?) were not pressing enough to detract from my appreciation of the collection.

As anyone who has read through a stack of teaching philosophies can attest, writing lucidly and engagingly about pedagogy is no easy task and one at which mounting professionalization rarely trains us to excel. The best essays in the collection are those that are specific and honest about the author’s teaching choices, the motivations behind them, and their results. Leigh C. Dillard’s contribution on the book history context of Fielding’s novels (focusing primarily on illustration) is exemplary in its inclusion of annotated assignment descriptions, as is Lisa Maruca’s, which uses Fielding’s contributions to the “Pamela media event” to encourage students to think critically about mediation both in their use of resources such as ECCO and in the production of their own multimodal resources. Pamela S. Bromberg makes a compelling case for defying chronology and beginning an eighteenth-century novel course with Tom Jones; similarly, Manushag N. Powell convinces with a rousing defense of Jonathan Wild’s flexibility across the curriculum. Even those essays that attempt to place us inside the classroom make explicit the careful choices involved in even the most open-ended discussions: Ms. Kraft’s contribution deftly leads the reader through a classroom conversation about Fielding’s critical views on governance, highlighting not only the key questions she asks and passages to which she draws attention, but also her sense of the pacing at which she aims. I also appreciated those essays (Stephen C. Behrendt, “Teaching Fielding’s Idea of the Novel with Joseph Andrews,” is a standout) that were most explicit in characterizing the author’s institution and student body. This is not to say that when planning survey courses for the commuting nonmajors at my large, urban institution I cannot benefit from the insights of my colleagues teaching specialized courses in liberal arts schools, but such information is nevertheless useful in anticipating...