I've never heard of it, but a couple of things come to mind since it sounds relatively unknown:
Always make sure you set texts which are readily available to buy and not too horrifically expensive if they're novels. I've had a course where half the texts were out of print and mostly unfindable, and it was a nightmare.
Especially for an undergraduate course, it does help if there's some critical stuff written about the text already.
Other than that, if you think it's a good book, ties in well with the rest of your course and will be interesting to discuss, go for it. What's the slant of your course going to be, what else are you putting on it?
I didn't realize it was "unknown." But looking into it a bit, I realize it might be :)
Yes, availability of texts is always an issue! I had thought Lavengro would've been pretty easy to get hold of, but, like a couple of other texts that were very popular in those days that I'd like to put on various syllabi, I think I'll just have to edit 'em myself.
My litmus test for "critical stuff" is alway the TEAS (Twayne English Authors Series), and he's had a volume devoted to him there, so it's probably fine in the accessibility department.
The general Victorian issues in the book include: education, reading, outsiderism, high- and low-life, survivals from the past, autobiographical fiction. And other things, I'm sure. I didn't want to give too much away, because this was supposed to be an open-ended (and largely hypothetical) question, and I'm still looking for input...
I'm hardly a world authority, there are doubtless enormous quantities of Very Famous Books that I've never heard of in my life. I've frequently had reading lists where I'd never heard of half the texts, but by the time I'd done the course and knew the period better I was whingeing about how they had to pick the boringly obvious ones
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Well, I knew from the beginning that this is definitely not (now) a Very Famous Book, but in its time it was a second- or third-tier one, kind of on a level of sales/popularity between Charles Reade and J. H. Shorthouse. I have got 31 hits on the MLA article list for "George Borrow" and 21 for "Lavengro", 117 hits in the U of Toronto library catalogue and 39 in the Edinburgh University library catalogue (including a collected works) for anything related to "George Borrow". The nice thing about using any now-little-known book or author (like, say, Marie Corelli) is that students would ideally go to it clean, without premisconceptions, and have a hard time plagiarizing. Ideally. I always want to have students approach these texts on their own, to get a view of Victorian society through the lense of literature (and Lavengro is as good as or better than any other book in the period for breadth of social detail
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"Lavengro" was a popular work, standardly printed by Oxford University Press as a classic, until at least the 1970s. Since then its fame, and that of its author, have been in decline. This is unfortunate, since Borrow is endlessly interesting (if sometimes infuriating), full of wild ideas, magical descriptions of peoples, places and incidents, exploring the forgotten or hidden side of Victorian life.
Borrow tried to get away from the "genteel" novel tradition of the 19th century. This should make him attractive to modern students, I think ...
An issue might be that Lavengro is not quite a novel. It is written as an Autobiography, and relates loosely to events in Borrow's life, although much of it is pure fiction.
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Always make sure you set texts which are readily available to buy and not too horrifically expensive if they're novels. I've had a course where half the texts were out of print and mostly unfindable, and it was a nightmare.
Especially for an undergraduate course, it does help if there's some critical stuff written about the text already.
Other than that, if you think it's a good book, ties in well with the rest of your course and will be interesting to discuss, go for it. What's the slant of your course going to be, what else are you putting on it?
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Yes, availability of texts is always an issue! I had thought Lavengro would've been pretty easy to get hold of, but, like a couple of other texts that were very popular in those days that I'd like to put on various syllabi, I think I'll just have to edit 'em myself.
My litmus test for "critical stuff" is alway the TEAS (Twayne English Authors Series), and he's had a volume devoted to him there, so it's probably fine in the accessibility department.
The general Victorian issues in the book include: education, reading, outsiderism, high- and low-life, survivals from the past, autobiographical fiction. And other things, I'm sure. I didn't want to give too much away, because this was supposed to be an open-ended (and largely hypothetical) question, and I'm still looking for input...
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"Lavengro" was a popular work, standardly printed by Oxford University Press as a classic, until at least the 1970s. Since then its fame, and that of its author, have been in decline. This is unfortunate, since Borrow is endlessly interesting (if sometimes infuriating), full of wild ideas, magical descriptions of peoples, places and incidents, exploring the forgotten or hidden side of Victorian life.
Borrow tried to get away from the "genteel" novel tradition of the 19th century. This should make him attractive to modern students, I think ...
An issue might be that Lavengro is not quite a novel. It is written as an Autobiography, and relates loosely to events in Borrow's life, although much of it is pure fiction.
Martin Porter (martin@tartarus.org)
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