Week 1: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
The early novel works as a merging of the conventions of epic and romance. Oroonoko (1688), by a woman writer, represents these earliest tendencies of the novel form. We will think about how an imaginary journey to a distant country provides a metaphor for the novel’s earliest forms.
Week 2: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
The rise of capitalism and the Protestant revolution are drivers behind Robinson Crusoe (1719). Crusoe’s journey and early independence are presented as emblems of an emergent middle class and the escape from hierarchy and the strictures imposed by a land-based nobility. New lands offer chances for reinvention.
Week 3: Robinson Crusoe continued
Colonies are new territories for exploration and exploitation, even of the erotic kind. We will look at the relationship between Crusoe and his slave/servant Man Friday, with Defoe creating a new class system as a white man imposes “civilization” on a far-away, benighted native population.
Week 4: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
We will discuss conduct manuals as a means of bodily control and consider their influence on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740). We will look at the Pamela controversy, possibilities for new forms of feeling, and consider the novel’s epistolary form as foundational to its inner mental landscape.
Week 5: Pamela continued
According to Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1989), one of novel’s origin points is the legitimization of female desire. We discuss Pamela, the reformation of the thoroughgoing cad Mr. B., and will locate fulfilled female desire as one of the early novel’s emblematic features.
Week 6: Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or Love in a Maze
We discuss Eliza Haywood brilliant novella Fantomina (1725), whose heroine continually attempts to remake her identity by moving to different places and assuming new identities. A tragic story about female desire, Fantomina brings together the early novel’s two tendencies: internal feeling and external journeying.
