Title: TOPICS IN LITERATURE

PRQ:

Many literary histories name Samuel Richardson as the progenitor of the novel. Whether or not we locate the rise of the novel in the 1740s or some earlier period, Richardson certainly solidifies two longstanding novelistic concerns: the centrality of women characters and a concern with companionate love.  This course will cross and recross the Atlantic investigating the ways that the courtship narrative and the drive toward the inevitable heterosexual union in marriage shaped the concerns of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English and American novelistic tradition. 

Students will write one ten-page essay and complete a mid-term and final exam as well as participating regularly in our discussions.

Along with a heavy dose of literary and historical scholarship on the period, we will likely read Richardson’s Pamela, the anonymous The Female American, Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, William Wells Brown’s Clotelle, E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, and a tba fictional selection on Mormon marriage in the nineteenth-century.