ENH2090

Rakes and revolutionaries I: women and their representation in eighteenth-century literature

Not offered in 1999

H Thomson

8 points - 2.5 hours per week - First semester - Clayton

Objectives Students taking this subject should develop the capacity to read a range of eighteenth-century texts written by women (and some men) and about women, with an enlarged understanding of both the historical period and gender issues, with special reference to shaping ideologies and genre distinctions.

Synopsis The subject provides an opportunity for students to extend their study of eighteenth-century literature with particular emphasis on the non-canonical writing of women of the period, alongside some of the male writing. The subject begins with Aphra Behn and Restoration England, where male gender stereotypes such as the Rake will be examined, proceeds through the mid-century period of conservative consolidation, and ends with the post-French Revolutionary decade of the 1790s and examines the implications of the rhetoric of liberation for women of the time. Topics discussed will include gender stereotypes, male representations of fictional women, the impact of gender issues on the writing of both men and women, the epistolary novel, women's poetry, class and female autonomy, conduct literature, the courtship novel, didactic strategies, the moral etiquette novel and the female Gothic novel.

Assessment Exercise (1000 words): 20% - Essay (2000 words): 30% - Examination (3 hours): 40% - Class presentation: 10%

Prescribed texts

Burney F Evelina OUP
Defoe D Roxana Penguin
Lonsdale R (ed.) Eighteenth-century women poets OUP
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

Austen J Sense and sensibility OUP
Butler M Romantics, rebels and reactionaries: English literature and its background 1760-1830 OUP
Spencer J The rise of the woman novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen Allen and Unwin

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