Novel Pedagogy: The Novel and Educational Publications in Victorian Britain

Is the novel a category of knowledge that merits serious study? Even if the novel has shed the stigma of being mindless entertainment, one might easily assume that reading a novel is not ＂studying,＂ unless one reads closely and carefully, preferably from a scholarly edition or for a scholarly purpose. Novel Pedagogy explores how Victorian writers envisioned the novel’s potential to become knowledge long before the form’s ascendence into the ivory tower. Liwen Zhang argues that Victorian novelists’ constant critique of schooling, on the one hand, and their frequent invocation of deep knowledge, on the other, are not self-contradictory. Instead of offering a blissful escape from education, writers such as William Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and George Gissing seek to offer uniquely novelistic pathways to knowledge. Novel Pedagogy offers a new model of novelistic epistemology by showing how the novel, unlike other educational genres, reflects on the unpleasant realities of learning--and of not learning--amid the ubiquity of ineffective textbooks, reluctant students, and false motivations.

Liwen Zhang is tenure-track Lecturer in English Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University.