Is Victorian English literature widely studied in Japan?
Yes, in translation. English literature used to be connected to English education in universities. I mean, many university teachers adopted English literary works as teaching materials for teaching English itself. But now too much emphasis is being put on the communicative aspects of English education, while English literature (except 20th-century literature) is kept away from the classroom. Dickens and Gaskell, for example, are considered too difficult for our students in the original English. Teachers in American literature classrooms often have difficulty getting their students excited about these Victorian works of fiction. How do you get Japanese students interested? In terms of difficulty, Victorian literature is much less popular than modern American literature — Hemingway, for example. Almost all of the famous literary works from the UK and the USA have been translated into Japanese. This is why our students can get interested in them even though they are very poor at reading
