English 320: Gender and
Class in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel
Elisabeth Rose Gruner
Ryland Hall 303-C
Office Hours, Spring 2005
Thursday, 9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
And by appointment
Spring 2005
This course starts from the observation that the woman
novelist, the novel itself, and the middle class all rose to prominence in 19th
century. What can current thinking
about class and gender tell us about the nineteenth-century novel, and
vice-versa? The novel is usually seen as a middle-class product for
middle-class consumers: what does the novel teach us about the operations of
class in the nineteenth century?
While women were the novels' primary consumers, they are not its most
celebrated practitioners. Have
women's novels simply been marginalized?
How do their concerns compare with those expressed in the
"canon" of 19th-century literature? Course material will
include recent work by contemporary critics and theorists; secondary material
on The Woman Question and The Condition of England; and novels by Elizabeth
Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontė, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Jane
Austen, and William Makepeace Thackeray.
We'll spend about two weeks discussing each novel
along with primary source material and secondary readings. The course will be a
discussion course, and will probably require two short papers, a final exam,
and a detailed research paper proposal.
The central focus of the course is the way in which
gender and class reinforce and conflict with each other in the development of
the novel in the nineteenth century.
We'll also discuss the ways in which current feminist and materialist
scholarship informs our readings of the novels.
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