This seminar explores the emergence of the English novel between 1500 and 1800 through the interconnected histories of female authorship, female readership, and narrative form. Focusing on a mixture of short prose fiction, proto-novels, and early novels, the course examines how women writers—and male authors writing in female voices—experimented with narrative authority, morality, desire, and social ambition. Students will read representative works by writers such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Daniel Defoe, alongside contextual material on female literacy and contemporary anxieties about women’s reading practices. Particular attention is paid to formal features including epistolary form, masquerade, parody, and confession, and to debates about whether and how these texts constitute ‘a novel'. By the end of the seminar, students will be able to analyse early prose fiction in relation to questions of gender, readership, and literary form, and to situate the early novel within its social and cultural contexts.
Assessment:
For proseminar credits - a reading diary
For proseminar exam credits - timed online test
For more details, please see the course description and syllabus
Content warnings: Many of the texts will deal with sexual themes, and some with sexual violence. I will endeavour to give pertinent content warnings for particular passages that deal with explicit issues such as sexual violence, but students should be prepared to discuss issues surrounding desire, consent and sexuality throughout the course. If you do not feel comfortable discussing these topics in class, then it may be necessary to choose a different course.
In addition, sexism, racism, and discriminatory language used prevalently within the early modern period (1500-1800) will occur within these texts due to the context in which they were written. In order to not ignore them, which would thus be to accept that they are in some way 'normal' elements of language, students must be prepared to acknowledge, discuss, and interrogate them. With that being said, unnecessary repetition of any discriminatory language will not be tolerated, and classroom discussions will be academic and sensitive.
- Teacher: Honor Jackson