ENG31980 Women and the Novel in Romantic-era Britain

Academic Year 2022/2023

This is a module on women's novels 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.

The Romantic era (approximately 1770-1830) 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. Furthermore, these women were deeply interested in the work of their contemporaries. As a new genre, the novel in particular was attractive to women because it offered greater freedom in its use of form, and in its capacity to engage with their contemporary society. The rise of the circulating library made novels available to people of every stratum of society, especially women. The association of women with the novel form inevitably raised questions about its suitability, and the dangers of encouraging emotional investment in potentially amoral fables.

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. We will be studying the writing of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, and breaking through the misconceptions entrenched in our own culture by costume drama, and looking at the literary skill, and the engagement with their own world shown by all of these novelists.

Students will be expected 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 a variety of smaller assignments, 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.