Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of the instructor.

Recent offerings:

Fall 2009, Rogers

The rise of the novel in the eighteenth century is one of the most important developments in English literature. This course will consider research on female novelists that has helped debunk the myth of female inferiority.  Exploring questions of gender and genre in texts by both male and female authors, we will wrestle with the question of whether there is a female tradition in the novel.

Texts (novels to be chosen from the following list):

• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
• Sarah Fielding, David Simple
• Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
• Eliza Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
• Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker
• Frances Burney, Evelina
• Ann Radcliffe, The Italian or Udolpho
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice/ Northanger Abbey

Additional Readings: Rogers, The Matrophobic Gothic (on library reserve)

Evaluation:  Short papers and quizzes for each work, book reviews, presentations, research paper

Fall 2008, Friedlander

This seminar will focus intently on the collected poems of Emily Dickinson as published in R. W. Franklin’s 1998 variorum edition. For context, students will also read a small selection of poems by Dickinson’s American contemporaries. No prior skill in reading poetry is required: students will get a crash course in the basics, with particular attention paid to the workings of figurative language. Issues to be taken up over the course of the semester will include textual editing, the construction of literary history, the intelligibility of experience, the autonomy of language; student interest will dictate other directions. Our discussions will be helped along by sample readings from the critical literature.

Required Texts:

The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Variorum Edition), ed. R. W. Franklin (Harvard UP, 1998), 3 vols.

I may also assign the Library of America anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry (college edition). Unfortunately, this book does not include much work by ante-bellum “poetesses,” which makes it only half serviceable for our purposes. Photocopy handouts would be the alternative.

The class as a whole will read a few essential essays in photocopy handout. Students will otherwise be reading individually chosen or assigned works of literary criticism, to be drawn from the course reserve at Fogler Library.

Evaluation: Weekly responses (including two critical notes, one on a poem, another on a work of literary criticism) and a final project.

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