ABSTRACT

This edited collection will turn a critical spotlight on the set of texts that has constituted the high school canon of literature for decades. By employing a set of fresh, vibrant critical lenses—such as youth studies and disabilities studies— that are often unfamiliar to advanced students and scholars of secondary English, this book provides divergent approaches to traditional readings and pedagogical practices surrounding these familiar works. By introducing and applying these interpretive frames to the field of secondary English education, this book demonstrates that there is more to say about these texts, ways to productively problematize them, and to reconfigure how they may be read and used in the classroom.

chapter 1|17 pages

Introduction

The Center of the Canon: The High School Classroom

chapter 2|16 pages

Why Did the “Star-Crossed Lovers” Never Have a Chance?

(Mis)Guided Adult Interference in Romeo and Juliet

chapter 3|21 pages

Dances, Dresses, and Speaking Her Mind

The Cultural Work of Pride and Prejudice

chapter 5|17 pages

It’s Really All About Tom

Performances of the Masculine Self in The Great Gatsby

chapter 6|17 pages

Readers’ Hearts Seek Connection

Transactional Theory Applied to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

chapter 7|17 pages

Disturbing the Universe

Reading The Stranger Through a Lens of Philosophical Criticism

chapter 9|16 pages

Reinterpreting Revolutions

An “Encoding/Decoding” Analysis of Animal Farm

chapter 10|15 pages

When New Criticism and Reader Response Aren’t Enough

Reading “Against”To Kill a Mockingbird Through a Critical Whiteness Lens

chapter 12|21 pages

“We Got to Be Smart to Git Away”

Revisiting African American Language and Emancipatory Literacy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Sapphire’s PUSH