Re-Educating the Imagination: Toward a Poetics, Politics, and Pedagogy of Literary Engagement

Northrop Frye's conception of the educated imagination has become a major theoretical and practical touchstone for many of today's English teachers at the secondary and college levels. Within the educated imagination, the three crucial issues in literature education address why literature is taught, what is taught, and how it is taught--what Deanne Bogdan terms respectively the justification, censorship, and response problems, all of which form a complex of assumptions about the place and function of literature within the curriculum.

Re-Educating the Imagination examines the implications of Frye's theory. Bogdan analyzes the educational context of literary engagement, offering a revision of the educated imagination in terms of real readers reading in the classroom.