How can secondary English teachers help students gain insight from the moral development of fictional characters? This book offers guidance for teachers looking to include character education within their lessons. It demonstrates how teachers can provide an encounter with literature that enables students to be more responsive to ethical themes and questions. Instead of focusing on the formal analysis of plot, symbol, mood and irony, the author shows how to draw instructive insights from fictional life narratives so that pupils can be prompted to consider and evaluate an individual's motivations, aspirations and choices. The book is divided into two parts. The first part provides a theoretical basis for this new approach to teaching character through English. Part two, 'Case Studies in Character', shows you how this approach can be applied to four literary characters: Sydney Carton from Charles Dickens' Tales of Two Cities; Jay Gatsby from F.
Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby; Elizabeth Bennett from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Janie Crawford from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ideas from these case studies can be transferred to other novels being read in the classroom. Fictional characters' struggles are of interest to students as they strive to set a course for their own life journey, make their own choices, and in doing so, give consideration to the kind of person they would like to become. This book will show how you can help your pupils to more fruitfully examine literary characters' choices and commitments within the contexts of the novels they read, and in a way that respects the integrity of the story, embraces the complexity of a character's moral growth and responds to the developmental readiness of the adolescent reader.