Rejoicing under the full title of “Pedagogy Report: Embedding Popular Romance Studies in Undergraduate English Units: Teaching Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester by Lisa Fletcher, Rosemary Gaby, and Jennifer Kloester”, this article from the
Journal of Popular Romance Studies offers this abstract to its contents:
This article outlines one model for introducing popular romance studies to undergraduate English programs: teaching romance texts and topics alongside canonical and contemporary literary texts. It discusses the authors’ approach to teaching Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester in a unit on historical fiction offered at the University of Tasmania in 2010 and analyses student responses to this initiative through examination of selected assessment tasks.
After some quite dense teaching theory, the meat of the article is the summary of two lectures delivered at the University of Tasmania in 2010, as part of the course unit “Fictions of History,” in which Sylvester is used to illustrate the profound use of period detail employed by writers of historical fiction — Heyer in particular — and also discuss the effect of her classification as a “romance novelist” on her ongoing critical reception.
One lecture summary is of one given by our very own Jennifer Kloester, while the other is of UTAS lecturer Lisa Fletcher. Both are entirely fascinating.
