English 285 - Fall, 2012

Literature by Women

Topic: Jane Austen

Class Information

Instructor: Johns, Alessa
CRN: 43465
Time: W 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies

Description

English 285
Alessa Johns
Fall 2012

Jane Austen

In this seminar we will evaluate Jane Austen's novels in their full historical and socio-cultural context. We will look at writers who influenced her, at the impact of revolutionary events and the Napoleonic wars on her productions and reception, at contemporary aesthetic debates and her place as a novelistic innovator, at her contribution to socio-political debates concerning gender, class, nation, etc., and at her unusual position as subject of intense current appeal both popular and academic (including study of films, criticism, pilgrimage sites, sequels).

In addition to Austen's six published novels, we will take account of her unpublished works (e.g. juvenilia, letters, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon). We will also read excerpts from relevant contemporaries, for example Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, the Bluestockings (e.g. Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney), Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and other writers/works mentioned in her novels. In ancillary readings and oral reports we will survey a variety of critical approaches, evaluate her impact on prose fiction, consider translations and her international reception, probe how biographies have been written (when there is comparatively little to work with), look at how and why and when movies have been made, and at what the "Austen industry" and the activities of the Janeites mean.