Join us for “Reading Anne of Green Gables as Fantasy”: November SPACE Short Course - A Pilgrim in Narnia (2024)

Posted on October 25, 2024 by Brenton Dickieson

It’s a “Go” for Launch! I am takingAnne of Green Gables to SPACE once again in November!

Last fall, I taught “Reading L.M. Montgomery as Fantasy: Anne of Green Gables,” and it was one of my favourite teaching experiences ever. It is an idea that I have wanted to test for a while:rereading the iconic Anne of Green Gables as if it were a fantasy book rather than as realistic youth fiction (as it has traditionally been sold). I ended up broadcasting from different places in the land of Anne, including her grandfather’s homestead. While I had a hunch that the material would work, I was amazed at how powerfully this approachtransformed Anne of Green Gablesfor me as a reader.

So, we are offering “AGG as Fantasy” again in November, with a view to a similar approach in the future toEmily of New Moon, The Story Girl, or another Anne book (Rainbow Valley, maybe?).

Click here to sign up or get more details: http://blackberry.signumuniversity.org/r/tNkb8W.

SPACE is an online, interactive, non-credit short course program for adult lifelong learning. It is quite an innovative program for folks who want to engage in great discussions and learn more about things they love. Classes are $100-$150, depending on how frequently you take the journey, and you can sign up here.

In the course description and video teaser below (where I sort of snuck into a National Park after hours), I make my pitch for why this short course could be really beneficial to first-time Anne readers and old friends of Green Gables.

I don’t know if my “Fantasy Anne Experiment” will create a revolution in literature or anything, but it is a chance to spend 8 classes over 4 weeks close-reading Anne of Green Gables and seeing a classic from a new angle.

Reading L.M. Montgomery as Fantasy: Part 1: Anne of Green Gables
Precepted by Dr. Brenton Dickieson

Within weeks of its 1908 publication, L.M. Montgomery’sAnne of Green Gablesbecame a bestseller. Over the years, this charming orphan story put Montgomery and her imaginative Prince Edward Island on a global map.

Despite the fact thatAnne of Green Gablesis Canada’s bestselling novel throughout the world—or because of it—Montgomery was ignored by the literati and scholarship. Montgomery was a public intellectual, the first female Canadian fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and invested Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Still she was dismissed as “just” a children’s writer, a regionalist, or a woman. It was 25 years after Montgomery’s death before children’s literature and feminist scholars began to recover her work as worthy of study.

While there is a robust field of Montgomery scholarship, there are areas where our focus is sometimes too narrow. One of these is the category of “realistic” fiction. While there is a kind of verisimilitude about everyday life in the late Victorian era in her work, the realism is pressed to the margins of definition as Montgomery romanticizes the worlds she creates. And can we disagree that there is something magical about Anne herself? By changing our way of approach and by looking atAnne of Green Gablesas a fantasy novel, what can we unveil in this classic novel?

Native Prince Edward Islander and Montgomery scholar Brenton Dickieson will lead students through a rereading ofAnne of Green Gablesusing the lenses we use to study fantasy and speculative fiction with the goal of allowing one of the greatest living children’s books to live in new ways.

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This entry was posted in L.M. Montgomery, and tagged Anne of Green Gables, distance education, Emily of New Moon, fantasy studies, fantasy theory, J.R.R. Tolkien, L.M. Montgomery, Prince Edward Island, Signum University, SPACE, The Story Girl. Bookmark the permalink.