English 723 E4R2A

Studies in Romantic Literature:

Jane Austen

Prof. David Richter

Syllabus

We shall be reading the six mature novels (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion) and interpreting them in the light of Austen's life, her letters and minor works, and the history of her times. Was Austen the "Gentle Jane" loved by the late Victorians who discovered her, or a wicked purveyor of social satire? Did she engage the stormy political issues that roiled Europe during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, or was she on the run from them? Was she an early feminist or a conservative about gender issues? The first six weeks will be spent surveying the novels; the last eight will be spent seminar-fashion, presenting, discussing, and critiquing the students' own research-in-progress.

Schedule:

Week 1: Organizational Meeting

Week 2: Northanger Abbey

Week 3: Sense and Sensibility

Week 4: Pride and Prejudice

Week 5: Mansfield Park

Week 6: Emma

Week 7: Persuasion

Week 8: Oral Reports 1 & 2

Week 9: Oral Reports 3 & 4

Week 10: Oral Reports 5 & 6

Week 11: Oral Reports 7 & 8

Week 12: Oral Reports 9 & 10

Week 13: Oral Reports 11 & 12

Week 14: Oral Reports 13 and 14

Paper and Oral Report Topics

Anything goes, or almost anything, but the key to a good seminar that everyone enjoys and learns from is variety. It would be nice to have a paper on Austen and Irony, but it would not be much fun to have six of them. Therefore in addition to topics that primarily involve formal approaches and close readings, I encourage topics

--- that move us back to Austen’s predecessors, from whom she learned her craft (principally Richardson, Fielding, and Burney), or that investigate Austen’s first steps in fiction (the juvenilia), or her unfinished works (The Watsons and Sanditon).

--- that move us forward to Austen’s successors, either immediate (e.g., the so-called “silver fork” school of fiction, now practically unknown, that flourished in the days when Dickens was starting to have a reputation) or long-term (twentieth-century novelists of manners like Ivy Compton-Burnett or Barbara Pym).

--- that move us laterally, to understand her relation to contemporaries like Robert Bage and Maria Edgeworth, who were also writing comic novels of manners, or contemporary social thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, or literary trends of her day like sentimentalism, Romantic poetry, and the Gothic novel.

--- that investigate contemporary nonfictional texts like conduct books or medical treatises, or contemporary practices like marriage and sex (pre- or extra-marital), medical fads including taking the waters at Bath, or fashion, contemporary painting, or trends in landscape gardening, or music and dancing, or food and drink.

--- that engage Austen’s relation to issues of social concern in her day (anti-slavery campaigns, evangelicalism and methodism in religion, the corresponding societies, war and the military, colonial policy).

--- that engage the reception of Austen (when did she become a Great Author, and for whom, and why), from her contemporary reception, to the so-called Janeites, to the recent high reputation of Austen as a Hollywood screenwriter. Another “reception” topic might be the “continuations” of Austen novels by various hands (e.g., Pemberley by Emma Tennant) written for Janeites who having exhausted the published Austen material are hungry for more.

Required Texts:

All six novels have been ordered in the handy Oxford World Classics edition and should be in the QC bookstore. This edition need not be purchased, however: you may read the novels in any adequate modern edition.

Internet Resources on Jane Austen

Jane Austen Information Page

Resources in Rosenthal:

Bibliography:

Roth, Barry. An annotated bibliography of Jane Austen studies, 1973-83. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985.

Gilson, David. A bibliography of Jane Austen. Oxford: Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1985.

Biography:

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: a life. New York : Alfred A. Knopf , 1997.

Nokes, David. Jane Austen: a life. New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997.

Honan, Park. Jane Austen : her life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.

Selected Literary Criticism:

Waldron, Mary. Jane Austen and the fiction of her time. Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Parker, Jo Alyson. The author's inheritance : Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the establishment of the novel. DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 1998.

Troost, Linda and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Bilger, Audrey. Laughing feminism : subversive comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster.. The Cambridge companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Sales, Roger. Jane Austen and representations of Regency England. London ; New York : Routledge, 1996.

Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal beings : politics, gender, and sentimentality in the 1790s : Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Looser, Devoney, ed. Jane Austen and discourses of feminism. New York : St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Lane, Maggie. Jane Austen and food. London: Hambledon Press, 1995.

Austen, Jane. Jane Austen's letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Collins, Irene. Jane Austen and the clergy. London: Hambledon Press, 1994.

Scheuermann, Mona. Her bread to earn : women, money, and society from Defoe to Austen. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Kaplan, Deborah. Jane Austen among women. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Wiltshire, John. Jane Austen and the body : "the picture of health". Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Gard, Roger. Jane Austen's novels : the art of clarity. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1992.

Stokes, Myra. The language of Jane Austen : a study of some aspects of her vocabulary. New York : St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Handler, Richard and Daniel Segal. Jane Austen and the fiction of culture : an essay on the narration of social realities. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, c1990.

Stout, Janis P. Strategies of reticence : silence and meaning in the works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

Sulloway, Alison G. Jane Austen and the province of womanhood. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Thompson, James. Between self and world : the novels of Jane Austen. University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, c1988.

Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen : women, politics, and the novel. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Mooneyham, Laura G. Romance, language, and education in Jane Austen's novels. New York : St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Evans, Mary. Jane Austen and the state. London and New York : Tavistock Publications, 1987.

Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen, feminism and fiction. New York : Methuen, 1986.

Poovey, Mary. The proper lady and the woman writer : ideology as style in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Monaghan, David, ed. Jane Austen in a social context. Totowa, N.J. : Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.

Morgan, Susan. In the meantime : character and perception in Jane Austen's fiction. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal beings : politics, gender, and sentimentality in the 1790s : Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the gothic : Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1980.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the war of ideas. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1975.

Brown, Julia Prewitt. Jane Austen's novels : social change and literary form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.

O'Farrell, Mary Ann. Telling complexions : the nineteenth-century English novel and the blush. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1997.

Duckworth, Alistair M. The improvement of the estate : a study of Jane Austen's novels. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Tave, Stuart M. Some words of Jane Austen. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1973.