01 MW4 CAC 33518 KURNICK SC-115
01-Promiscuity, Fidelity, and the Novel
The novel is frequently described in terms of the "marriage plot," but the form might equally be seen as exploring multiple emotional and sexual partnerships. This course will examine fictions where serial entanglements are the norm in order to ask why the novel has been so interested in the fact of faithlessness. We’ll focus on works of the English nineteenth century, but will also move outside this period and nation to touch on the sentimental novel, French courtesan fiction, modernist explorations of the sexual demi-monde and more recent depictions of queer urban life. Questions to be explored: the historical mutations in the meanings of promiscuity; its association with sexual minorities, women, working-class people and aristocrats; the ways narratives blur the line between fidelity and promiscuity; the relations between love and commerce, and between friendship and sex; the connections between serial publication and serial forms of sexuality. Possible writers to be covered include Defoe, Austen, Sterne, Dickens, E. Brontë, C. Brontë, James, Hardy, Zola, Barnes, Baldwin, and Hollinghurst.
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