English 203

Book List

Austen, Jane: Persuasion; Bronte, Charlotte: Shirley; Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone; Dickens, Charles: Bleak House; Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South; Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge; Hogg, James: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ; Scott, Walter: Old Mortality

Description

Reading and discussion of a selection of major nineteenth-century British novels.  We will bring large questions to bear on one another, concerning: the worlds and communities the novel aims to represent and to address (region or province; nation; empire; the world; “the condition of England”); different scales of history (personal and family histories; local, national and world histories; natural history / the history of the race or species); developing technologies and sites of narration (first-person memoir, chronicle, confession; third-person modes of free indirect style and omniscient narration; narration from below or outside, by servants, criminals, women, ethnic and religious outsiders); the sub-genres of the novel (regional, domestic, historical, industrial, sensation fiction, etc.) and the novel’s incorporation of, and self-positioning in relation to, other genres, styles and formats (romance, history, allegory, drama, lyric, periodicals). We will attend to social and material histories of book production and reading, as well as to representative criticism.

Works will include:  Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Scott, Walter: Old Mortality; Austen, Jane: Persuasion; Hogg, James: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Bronte, Charlotte: Shirley; Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South; Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone; Dickens, Charles: Bleak House; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge