ENGLISH 238 WHAT JANE AUSTEN READ: THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
ELIZABETH HARRIES
T Th 1-2:50

Like all novelists, Jane Austen was a reader. And among the things we know she read were earlier English novels. The novel was a “new” form, or “a new species of writing,” and, like all new forms, it was considered suspect, even dangerous. But Austen read novels anyway, enjoyed them, learned from them, and turned their often ungainly and sprawling shapes into her own compact, sparkling comic form.
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 used 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 men and women in the gentry, the middle class, the servant class, and the criminal sub-culture; changing publication practices; 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.

This course is designed for 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 paper or exam.

A tentative list of the novels we'll read:
Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
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 (Volumes I, II, VII)
Frances Burney: Evelina
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

(Since the reading is quite heavy, I recommend getting a head start over the summer. Start with Northanger Abbey. What questions do you have about it? )