English 203

Other Readings and Media

Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Scott, Walter: Waverley OR Old Mortality OR Ivanhoe; Austen, Jane: Persuasion; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Hogg, James: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton; Braddon, Mary: Lady Audley?s Secret; Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone; Dickens, Charles: Little Dorrit; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge

Description

A selection of major nineteenth-century British novels. We will bring some large questions to bear on one another: questions about the world, locality or society the novel aims to represent (region or province; nation; empire / ?the globe?; ?the condition of England?), looking at the function of history (personal and collective, with attention to the century?s shift from national history to natural history as authoritative discourses) and representative types or figures (including the alien, misfit, criminal, monster, scapegoat); questions about form, including narrative form (first-person memoir or confession; third-person modes of free indirect style and omniscient narration), genre (not only the different kinds of the novel in the period?regional, domestic, historical, industrial, sensation fiction, etc.?but the novel?s internal posing of itself in relation to other genres and modes, e.g. romance, history, allegory, lyric), and material form (publishing, format, institutions of production and reception).