ENG31980 Jane Austen and her Peers

Academic Year 2021/2022

This is a module on women's writing in the Romantic era. Students should be aware that they will be required to read long eighteenth-century novels, and are required to read ALL of the novels on this course.

This module is NOT a lecture course--students are expected to play a significant part in class each week.

Recent research on Jane Austen has shown convincingly that her work was very much engaged with the Britain of her time, and perhaps more importantly, that she was deeply interested in the writings of her contemporaries. We will be studying the writing of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen. Austen was far from the lone literary genius of her generation; in fact the time in which she lived saw a flowering of female talents—women carved out careers as playwrights, historians, social commentators, poets and novel-writers, in greater numbers than ever before.

This course, therefore, is NOT focused exclusively on Jane Austen. 'Jane Austen and Her Peers' will examine a number of Austen’s writings side-by-side with the works of her contemporaries. Students will engage with writers they might not previously have known of or read, and will gain a much greater understanding of the literary state of Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. Myths about women as writers in this era will be challenged, and their use and development of the novel form will be central to our exploration of writing from this era.

Contrary to received opinion, Austen was not the most popular novelist of her day--her female and male contemporaries easily outsold her. It is instructive then, to read Austen in the context of her peers, and to read her deeply, rather than simply enjoying her work as a costume drama. Students will be expected to move beyond conventional interpretations of Austen and her contemporaries, and to show initiative, critical discernment and originality when approaching both canonical and non-canonical works. We will move away from a focus on characters and character analysis. Instead we will study how writers construct the novel form, and imbue meaning into patterns, employ different kinds of voice and vocabulary, and comment through structure, not just with words. We will also examine how novelists engage with the reality of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Students will be expected to learn about the importance of economics, the law, primogeniture, social structures, and even war. Different novel forms will be studied: the epistolary novel, the gothic novel, the romance, and early attempts at realism. Students will be expected to deconstruct the novels to focus on form, literary structures and techniques, and literary and social ideologies.

Students' engagement will be tested by in-class quizzes, other written exercises, and a detailed essay plan. Please note that some exercises may need to be modified in the event of online learning.

Please note that students are expected to read and engage with ALL texts on this course, including a number of lengthy novels, Romantic-era texts. and significant amounts of critical sources.

*** This is a third-year course, and will be examined as such***

PLEASE NOTE that the School of English, Drama and Film reserves the right to withdraw modules in the period up to and including the first week of the teaching trimester.