Literature and Education

The aim of the Routledge Literature & Education series is to address the multiple ways in which education and literature interact. Numerous texts exist that deal with literary issues for educational purposes, serving the schools and higher education markets. Within the academic field of educational studies, there are works on the value of literature for moral formation or for the broader humanistic development of students of all ages. Within literary studies, there is a range of works that discuss the ways in which authors, texts or literary movements address educational themes. However, comparatively little has been written that specifically explores the complex notions of how literary texts function educatively, or what happens to them once they are brought into educational spaces and used for educational purposes. Additionally, limited attention has been paid explicitly to the ways in which literature can be a resource for educational thought or can nurture and inspire educational change.

This series provides a space for these issues to be explored. It presents scholarship working at the intersection of literary and educational studies and seeks to define an important and emerging area of interdisciplinary enquiry. Titles in this series engage in significant ways with what happens when an intermediate space opens up between the study of literature and the study of education. The series proposes a broad understanding of literature and education that is not bound by particular national, pedagogical or political contexts, and titles address one or more of the following themes:

     1. Literature as education

This theme connects discussions within educational studies and literary studies about the extent to which literature can or ought to be considered as educational.　

     2. The co-construction of literature and education

This theme addresses the various ways that the fields of literature and education have historically, theoretically and imaginatively served to co-construct one another, for example the relation of the literary canon to the literary curriculum, and the formation of literature as a school and university subject.　　　

     3. What literature can teach us about education　

This theme addresses the ways that educational questions have been explored by different writers, literary movements and genres, drawing on the combined theoretical and interpretive resources of literary and educational studies.

For more information about the series, or to submit a book proposal, please contact Andrew Green (Andrew.Green@brunel.ac.uk) and David Aldridge (Aldridgd@edgehill.ac.uk).