Novel Readings
 
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About the Author

Rohan Maitzen

I am an English professor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I blog at Novel Readings. More information about me can be found at my home page.

About This Index

I began blogging at Novel Readings in January, 2007. This index page provides a guide to the majority of the substantive reviews and commentaries posted there. The usual format of a blog, always presenting the most recent content first, implies (misleadingly, in my view) that older content becomes less relevant and interesting as it recedes into the archives. Searching by 'label,' though it gathers related content, similarly enforces the primacy of the latest installment--even though the most recent post most likely builds on a chain of thoughts and references developed over time and thus best followed in chronological order.

Because I have conceived of Novel Readings not (or not just) as a news feed on my latest reading, teaching or thinking, but also as a repository of ideas and readings, I hope here to off-set this bias towards the recent by organizing the content of the blog according to a different principle or image: as an interrelated set of constantly evolving or expanding chapters. Each 'chapter' heading is followed by a chronological series of links to posts at Novel Readings, then--or, on occasion, to posts at The Valve, where I have been a contributor since March 2008.  I hope that by offering this alternative approach to navigating the blog that I can enhance its usefulness, not only to myself by making it easier to locate and track the unfolding of ideas I'm not finished with yet, but also to visitors. To paraphrase a famous philosopher, Novel Readings (like every blog) will not therefore have been, (nor will it ever be) a book--but it is something like one, a malleable, unstable, diffuse one, in ways that this Index helps display.

Teaching Literature

This Week in My Classes: 2007-8

Fall Term:19th-Century Novel Dickens to Hardy; Victorian Women Writers
Winter Term: Mystery and Detective Fiction; The Victorian 'Woman Question'
Summer Term: Women and Detective Fiction
This Week in My Classes 2008-9

Fall Term: Introduction to Prose and Fiction; Nineteenth-Century Fiction Austen to Dickens
Winter Term: Mystery and Detective Fiction; Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt
  • January 6, 2009: Introductions; Hopkins and Tennyson
  • January 16, 2009: Collins, The Moonstone; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and Past and Present
  • January 25, 2009: Collins, The Moonstone; Dickens, A Christmas Carol
  • February 5, 2009: Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; Tennyson, In Memoriam AHH
  • February 11, 2009: Chandler, "Trouble is My Business"; Darwin, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man
  • February 20, 2009: Hammett, The Maltese Falcon; Browning, "Caliban Upon Setebos"
  • March 3, 2009: P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman; George Eliot, Silas Marner
  • March 10, 2009: Grafton, 'A' is for Alibi; Matthew Arnold, Poems
  • March 23, 2009: Robinson, Rankin, McBain; Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
  • April 9, 2009: Auster, City of Glass; Hardy, Jude the Obscure