English 6520 meets on Tuesdays from 12:30 until 3:15 in Park Hall 67.
My office hours are on Tuesdays (11-11:30), Thursdays (11-12:00), and by appointment in Park 240.
This semester we’ll be exploring the development of the British novel over the course of the nineteenth century. While we’ll be reading canonical texts: Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), we’ll also be reading less familiar texts from the century to explore which histories of the novel are still untold.
Readings include John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801), A Woman of Colour (1808), Amelia Opie’s Valentine’s Eve (1816), Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Octoroon (1877), and Amy Levy’s The Romance of the Shop (1888). While reading the novels, we’ll also be exploring the critical discourse that shapes the academy’s understanding of them. Critics will include early practitioners of theory from Anna Letitia Barbauld to Henry James and extend to current scholarship found in Novel, Studies in the Novel, and ELH, among other scholarly publications.
Course Schedule: January and February & March and April
Bibliography (Continuing Construction)