The reception and teaching of Shakespeare in nineteenth and early twentieth century America

Historically, Shakespeare's function in the American school curriculum has changed from being a vehicle of moral instruction to being an agent for deepening students' emotional response to life in general. He entered American culture through the familiar stage tradition and fragments of his work were used in the early schoolbooks. Recognizing the educational limitations of brief excerpts from his plays, high schools in the era of Henry Hudson and William Rolfe approached Shakespeare through editions of whole plays, justifying such study within the frameworks of orthodox Christianity and Unitarianism, respectively, and utilizing an aesthetic emphasis made possible by Romantic critical theory. The aesthetic approach to the texts competed for a time with the German-inspired philological approach, but a non-dogmatic aesthetic criticism eventually triumphed, with its appeals to emotion and to the validity of personal experience.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Lauck, John Hampton, II

Contributors dc:contributor

• Shapiro, Michael

• Education, Language and Literature
• Education, History of
• Literature, English

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1991 Lauck, John Hampton, II

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

AAI9210883
(UMI)AAI9210883

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/19739