•  
  •  
 

Author Biography

Misty Krueger is a visiting assistant professor of British literature at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches early modern, eighteenth-century, and Romantic literature. She has published essays on Restoration drama, William Blake, and Jane Austen. She also co-edited an issue of Persuasions On-line on the teaching of Austen and her contemporaries.

Abstract

This essay discusses how I incorporated readers theatre into a senior seminar on Jane Austen and her contemporaries. The article recounts how my students read Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1798 drama, Lovers’ Vows, and Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park, and then were inspired at the end of the seminar to take part in a readers theatre production of the play. In order to set up this pedagogical example, the essay addresses the theatrical episode of Mansfield Park, the controversies surrounding Lovers’ Vows, and the ways in which I edited the play and prepared students to create a “little theatre”—to quote Austen character, Tom Bertram—at my university and become their own version of The Mansfield Players. The essay concludes by explaining what students can learn about drama and the novel by partaking in such an exercise.

Keywords

readers theatre, live text, theatricals, drama, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mansfield Park, Lovers’ Vows

Download

Supplemental Content

Share

COinS