Genre, Author, Text, Reader: Teaching Nora Roberts’s Spellbound

Here's the abstract:

This article offers a reflection on the author’s experience of teaching a novella by Nora Roberts, Spellbound, to an undergraduate English subject Genre Fiction/Popular Fiction at the University of Melbourne. It outlines the subject’s overarching pedagogical approach, including its objectives, syllabus and assessment, and presents a summary of the lecture on Roberts and her novella, Spellbound that engages with notions of genre, author and text. In the final section, the article explicitly considers readers by reporting on a 2013 survey conducted by the author to gauge students’ reactions to studying Spellbound. This account of teaching Roberts raises questions about the interaction between reading for entertainment and reading for university, and the ways in which an academic context affects readers’ appreciation of different kinds of writing.