English 150

Other Readings and Media

Behn, A: The Rover; Bradstreet, A: Works of Anne Bradstreet; Burney, F: Evelina; Cavendish, M: The Blazing World; Fielding, S: History of Ophelia; Haywood, E: The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless; Kempe, M: Book of Margery Kempe; Lennox, C: The Female Quixote; Messenger, A: Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century; a course reader with theoretical and historical readings

Description

"Reading works written or dictated by women in England from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, we will explore how exclusion from the priesthood prompted women to style themselves as religious authorities outside the pulpit, how the English civil war spilled into a print battle between the sexes, and how women were refining the art of prose fiction long before Jane Austen was born. The course will be heavily weighted towards the eighteenth-century novel, an upstart literary form produced primarily by and for women.



Students will keep a reading journal and hand in a final paper. "