ENGL 397

Spring 2014 All Classes

All Classes

Honors Seminar II

Credit: 3 hours.

Periods in British, American, and Anglophone literature.

May be repeated. Prerequisite: A 3.33 grade-point average or consent of the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. Restricted to English and Rhetoric majors.

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ENGL 397 class schedule data for spring 2014
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32116	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:50PM	T	125 English Building	Nazar, H	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/14-05/07/14 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: The Woman Reader in Brit Fict Section Info: Topic Section P: The Woman Reader in British Fiction: Lennox to Austen Recent debates about the value of ?chick lit? bespeak an anxiety about what young women read that is by no means new. It has a long history, dating back to at least the eighteenth century, when women entered the literary marketplace in growing numbers as consumers and producers of literature. This course considers the pivotal figure of the female reader as it unfolds in eighteenth-century literature and culture?in fiction, poetry, conduct manuals, and educational and philosophical treatises. It asks why so much cultural attention became focused on women?s reading in the period known as the Enlightenment, what kinds of fears it harnessed, and how various women writers responded to it. Our core readings will include several novels which take as their heroines highly impressionable young women readers: works like Charlotte Lennox?s The Female Quixote (1752), the heroine of which imagines that she lives in a French chivalric romance; Mary Wollstonecraft?s Maria (1798) and Mary Hays?s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), which revolve around heroines who read in French sentimental fiction an endorsement of extra-marital relations; Amelia Opie?s Adeline Mowbray (1804), the eponymous heroine of which is so committed to the radical philosophy of the revolutionary period that she refuses to marry the man she love; and Jane Austen?s Northanger Abbey (1818), which takes as its heroine a young woman who cannot tell where a Gothic novel ends and real life begins. We will conclude the course with a viewing of the ITV miniseries, Lost in Austen (2008), which traces the fortunes of a Jane Austen fan who gets a chance to become a character in her favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice.