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It addresses how student interpretations—especially feminist readings—emerge when the text is read without context, and proposes returning to original publication materials in Harper’s Magazine. Paratexts such as illustrations and editor correspondence can make cultural-historical concerns explicit and help students historicize their reading positions in the twenty-first century.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/teaching-with-paratext-rereading-roald-dahls-lamb-to-the-slaughter-in-the-literature-classroom/576181/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/teaching-with-paratext-rereading-roald-dahls-lamb-to-the-slaughter-in-the-literature-classroom/576181.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Jiven","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-22","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":19},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why does the author emphasize paratext in teaching literature?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"Because paratextual materials—such as illustrations, letters, and related articles—provide a more complex cultural context for interpreting a text and make implicit meanings explicit.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What issue does the author observe in students’ reading of “Lamb to the Slaughter”?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Students often focus less on the twist ending and more on Mary Maloney as a proto-feminist or oppressed figure, even when the story is read without surrounding context.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How does returning to the original publication change the teaching approach?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"It provides paratextual evidence from Harper’s Magazine (1953) that can enrich and complicate students’ discernment, strengthening their ability to historicize their reading position.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},576181,1792373630,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":19,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":36},1099513958607,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/100002390cf8733938c?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1778829742770036399","Teaching with Paratext: Rereading Roald Dahl’s  \n“Lamb to the Slaughter” in the Literature Classroom  \nRhiannon Scharnhorst  \nUniversity of Cincinnati  \nWhenever I teach my food and literature class, I include Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story “Lamb to the Slaughter.” Most of my students know Dahl from reading his wildly successful children’s stories, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach among them, but few have read his adult fiction and fewer still have thought critically about his relationship to food.  1 “Lamb to the Slaughter” is his most anthologized short story. Its popularity is often ascribed to its twist ending, in which the main character, Mary Maloney, having murdered her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, feeds the cooked lamb to the investigators who come looking to solve the crime. Yet my students rarely focus on the twist ending. Instead, they express deep empathy and compassion for Mary as an oppressed figure in 1950s America, linking their reading of the story to their basic historical knowledge of the time period. What has always shocked me as their instructor is how often they read Mary’s act of violence not as bad or deserving of punishment but instead as a proto-feminist act, one that is precipitated by her stifled and restricted life as a housewife. Perhaps this reading developed out of the current discussion around consent and assault in the growing “\\#metoo” movement at the time of this writing—even though the movement was never referenced in class—but I was still surprised that my students were able to construe and articulate complicated feminist notions in a piece written by an author regularly  \ndescribed as misogynist.2 If my students were picking up on these notions, where or how were they getting there? I asked this question, in part, because we were reading the story devoid of context, as I had given them a free PDF version widely shared by instructors on the internet. By decontextualizing the story, I began to question if I was doing my students a disservice even as I tried to save them money. Would their readings ofthe story or the characters, especially Mary, change if it was placed within some context, be it an introductory literary anthology or even the original context of the story’s publication? Would their feminist reading be strengthened, challenged, or complicated if they were examining more material circulating around the story? Not unlike the investigators who arrive at Mary’s house, I decided to return to the “scene of the crime,” the original publication of the story in Harper’s Magazine in 1953. From there I discovered a trove of paratextual material that could enrich exactly what my students were discerning in the story in 2017.  \nParatextual material—in this case, illustrations, letters to the editor, and other articles published in the same issue of Harper’s Magazine—can offer a more complex and culturally textured understanding of a text. This essay proposes a pedagogical approach that embraces paratextual material in the literature classroom, both as a way to address how cultural and social concerns are always in flux, but also to demonstrate to students how their readings are always emplaced—i.e. situated in, reflective of, and partly determined by not just the particular culturalhistorical moment of a story’s publication, but also by their own emplacedness as readers in the twenty-first century. This approach addresses two pedagogical concerns: one, that we should consider writing’s paratextual context in the classroom as an expression of its cultural-historical  \nmoment; and two, that examining the paratextual material makes what may be implicit in a text explicit. In essence, I see the paratexual material bleeding through the story.  \nLiterary scholars are the most likely group to engage in paratextual analysis, particularly in the fields of book history and reception studies.3 In addition, interdisciplinary fields—such as fan fiction studies, adapt","cbCaigewMtkddn3x","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaigewMtkddn3x","pdf",523716,26,"English","# Teaching with Paratext\n## Rereading “Lamb to the Slaughter” in the Literature Classroom\n## Paratextual Material and Readerly Context\n## Pedagogical Approach and Learning Goals","[{\"question\":\"Why does the author emphasize paratext in teaching literature?\",\"answer\":\"Because paratextual materials—such as illustrations, letters, and related articles—provide a more complex cultural context for interpreting a text and make implicit meanings explicit.\"},{\"question\":\"What issue does the author observe in students’ reading of “Lamb to the Slaughter”?\",\"answer\":\"Students often focus less on the twist ending and more on Mary Maloney as a proto-feminist or oppressed figure, even when the story is read without surrounding context.\"},{\"question\":\"How does returning to the original publication change the teaching approach?\",\"answer\":\"It provides paratextual evidence from Harper’s Magazine (1953) that can enrich and complicate students’ discernment, strengthening their ability to historicize their reading position.\"}]","Teaching with Paratext - Rereading Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” in the Literature Classroom | PDF",1792029283]