Literary women of the eighteenth century
Proposed to be offered next in 1996
H Thomson
8 points * 2 hours per week * First semester * Clayton
The subject provides an opportunity for students to extend their study both of women's writing and literature of the eighteenth century. It will consider those women writers who have been traditionally excluded from previous eighteenth-century courses consisting entirely, for the most part, of male writers. Topics discussed will include male representations of fictional women, the epistolary novel, the diary and memoir, class and female autonomy, the courtship novel, didactic strategies, the moral etiquette novel, women and capitalism, and the female Gothic novel.
Assessment
Essay (2000 words): 40% * Essay (3000 words): 60%
Prescribed texts
Austen J Emma OUP
Burney F Evelina OUP
Defoe D Roxana OUP
Lonsdale R (ed.) Eighteenth century women poets
Radcliffe A The romance of the forest OUP
Richardson S Pamela Vol. 1 Penguin
Todd J (ed.) Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The rover and other works Penguin
Wollstonecraft M Mary and The wrongs of woman OUP
Recommended texts
Butler M Romantics, rebels and reactionaries: English literature and its background 1760-1830 OUP
Spencer J The rise of the woman novelist: From Aphra Benn to Jane Austen Allen and Unwin
Spender D Mothers of the novel Pandora