Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of selected literary works as they intersect with and are shaped by issues of gender and sexuality. May be organized by theme, critical approach, historical period, or individual author. Students with credit for ENGL 486 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Women and the Rise of the Novel
This course will examine novels by and about women in order to suggest that women’s roles and tenuous place in the eighteenth and early-mid nineteenth centuries were at the heart of the rise of the novel as a genre. Aphra Behn’s tale of slavery, incest, revenge, and travel; Samuel Richardson’s wildly successful Pamela and its spin-offs; Sarah Scott’s utopic vision of a female community; Jane Austen’s introspective and interior character of Anne Eliot; and Charlotte Brontë’s examination of women’s roles in mid-century Victorian England all speak to the place of women in history and within the novel. This course will examine the ways in which women reported on contemporary issues such as slavery (Behn) and were willing to critique the social and cultural realms of which they were a part (Behn, Haywood, Scott, Austen, and Brontë). We will ask questions about the representations of gender in novels by Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Henry Fielding and support our findings with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history and context, as well as current historical criticism. In order to expand our understanding of the ways in which gender works within the novel, we will also read current feminist criticism on gender and genre (and how these two concepts inform one another). Moving chronologically from Aphra Behn to Charlotte Brontë, we will gain a clearer understanding of what it was about women’s place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that gave rise to such a popular and enduring genre.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: