The earliest English novels tended to focus on everyday life, or at least life made to look more everyday than the lives of the heroes and heroines of the earlier prose romances. We will look carefully at the techniques the novelists use to make their worlds seem "real"--with an emphasis on their attempts to explore women's lives. Early novelists, both male and female, often found their subject in the struggles of a young woman to understand and to assert herself; again we will look at the techniques they developed for representing women's consciousness and choices.

Our emphasis on the novelists' concern with the everyday will make it necessary to take some searching looks at the culture of eighteenth and early nineteenth century England as it is reflected and distorted in the novels (in particular the life of the gentry, the middle class, and the criminal subculture; the impact of the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions); the concerns about Empire and slavery. And we will ask questions about realities the novels all leave out.

The course is designed for both English majors and non-majors. (I recommend at least one college-level course in literature first.) The two hour class sessions will be a varying mixture of informal lectures, group work, and discussion.

Course requirements: weekly postings to an electronic bulletin board, 2 short papers (4-6 pages), a final exam.

A tentative list of the novels we'll read: Aphra Behn: Oronooko
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders
Eliza Haywood: Fantomina; or, Life in a Maze
Samuel Richardson: Pamela or Clarissa
Henry Fielding: Shamela and Joseph Andrews
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Frances Burney: Evelina
Jane Austen: one novel, perhaps two
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

(Since the reading is quite heavy, I recommend getting a head start over the summer.)