350:549

Index # - 15532

Distribution Requirement: A3

Wednesday - 4:30 p.m.

MU 207

Michael McKeon

The Eighteenth-Century British Novel, Behn to Austen

The major reading for this course begins before the eighteenth century and ends after its conclusion in order to frame an understanding of the British novel in the first century of its existence. Our central texts will be: Aphra Behn, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister ((1684-87); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719);  Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740); Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742); Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67); Frances Burney, Evelina (1778); and Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1812).

We'll study these narratives in their historical contexts. Each week students will be asked to read a limited amount of contextual material, both primary and secondary, which will provide a distinct body of knowledge aimed at throwing the narratives themselves into relief. Some of this contextual reading will address the immediate political and intellectual contexts of the fictions with which they're read. Most of it will provide a cumulative grounding in a broad range of contemporary circumstance and developments that will make available to all of the narratives the materials for historical interpretation.

This weekly contextual material will be organized around topics like the following: patriarchalism; Tory feminism; the origins of liberalism and capitalism; the scientific revolution and empirical epistemology; Protestantism and secularization; propriety and property; family romance; the replacement of status by class; the replacement of gender by sex; sense and sensibility; the modern idea of the public and the private; the actual and the virtual; the rise of the modern aesthetic; the rise of realism. Class discussions will aim to make use of this cumulative knowledge, where profitable, in interpreting our eight narratives.        

 Students will be asked to write two papers of about ten pages each on topics of their own devising. I'll be available to help formulate these topics; students will be responsible for discovering pertinent criticism on the narrative(s) they decide to write about.