MONASH UNIVERSITY FACULTY HANDBOOKS

Arts Undergraduate Handbook 1996

Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996

ENH2090

Literary women of the eighteenth century

H Thomson

Synopsis 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 Eveline 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.) Alphra 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