Teaching Persuasion in Multiple Contexts

Authors

Peter J. Capuano, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2021

Citation

Chapter in Approaches to Teaching Austen's Persuasion, pages 39-52.

Edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire.

Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2021.

Comments

Copyright 2021, MLA. Used by permission.

Abstract

Teaching Persuasion in Multiple Contexts by Peter J. Capuano, a chapter in Approaches to Teaching Austen's Persuasion, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire, published by the Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2021.

Introduction

Jane Austen's more well-known fiction has inspired strong attachments from many people (instructors and students alike), but Persuasion might be Austen's most dynamic and teachable novel. In fact, one of the many advantages of teaching Persuasion is that so many students-even the ones who come into my courses already professing their love for Austen's works-have never read the text before. They are much more likely to have encountered Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, or Emma. The relative obscurity of Persuasion, therefore, lends collective freshness to the reading process that is lacking when, say, half the class is reading the material for the second or even third time. But it is not just the fact that Persuasion is the Austen novel my students are least likely to have read that makes it the most effective one to teach. In this essay I argue that Persuasion's place as Austen's final novel has much to do with its pedagogical effectiveness in two different courses I often teach at the undergraduate level: History and Theory of the British Novel, 1700-1900; and Survey of Nineteenth-Century British Literature.