Romance and Gender Theory in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
English 940
Meegan Kennedy
This course was taught at Trinity College, Summer 2002
This course will explore the gendering of the romance genre by reading theories of romance and of gender in the context of three nineteenth-century British novels. Readings will include Austen's Sense and Sensibility ; Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , Haggard's King Solomon's Mines ; theorists will include Frye, Derrida, Auerbach, Baym, McKeon; Woolf, Sedgwick, de Lauretis, Haraway, Rand and others.
I have tried for most weeks to include 1) fiction of the period; 2) literary criticism of the period; 3) theory of either romance (genre) or gender. We will progress in a roughly chronological order. We will meet Tuesday afternoons at 5:30 for three hours at the Glastonbury Barnes & Noble.
This course is technically a group independent study (due to library construction, no official courses can be held), but we will run it like a regular graduate course. Please alert me to any problems you may have with meeting deadlines due to the closure of the library. Remember that, as Trinity students, you are allowed to use the libraries at Connecticut College and Wesleyan University, and that the CTW interlibrary loan system is still in place.
Week 1
4 June 2002
McKeon, Michael. Section I (Chapters 1-3) of The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Reeve, Clara. Evenings I-VII, in The Progress of Romance . New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930 [1785].
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story . 1764. Ed. W.S. Lewis. NY: Oxford UP, 1982.
Week 2
11 June 2002
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility . (1795/1811). Norton.
Frye, Northrop. "Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths," in Anatomy of Criticism , Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957 (you should get); and excerpt from The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance.
Armstrong, Nancy, "The Rise of the Novel," in Desire and Domestic Fiction , NY: Oxford UP, 1987.
Week 3
18 June 2002
Scott, Sir Walter. "An Essay on Romance." 1824. Reprinted in Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and the Drama , also Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott , vol. 6.
Scott, Sir Walter. "Wandering Willie's Tale," from Redgauntlet (1832). Etext.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre . 1847. Norton. (Heather, you asked about Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic , certainly a classic, though now dated, feminist text. Gilbert's essay on JE from Madwoman appears in the Norton edn of Brontë's novel).
Ruskin, John, Modern Painters , selections.
Eliot, George. "Silly Novels By Lady Novelists" (in Thomas Pinney's Essays of George Eliot ) and Chapter 17 of Adam Bede.
Derrida, Jacques. "The Law of Genre." Critical Inquiry (1988), 7: 55-81. Also available in Glyph 7 (1980).
Week 4
25 June 2002
Haggard, H. Rider. She . 1887. NY: Dover, 1951.
Haraway, Donna, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," from Primate Visions , NY: Routledge, 1989. Romantic masculinity in Africa.
Auerbach, Nina. "Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian Freud." Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 281-99.
Lang, Andrew, "Realism and Romance," Contemporary Review , LII (Nov 1887), includes 691
Saintsbury, George, "The Present State of the Novel," Fortnightly Review XLII (Sept 1887), includes 417; also "The Present State of the Novel II," 43 ns (1888), pp. 112-23
Shorthouse, J. H., preface to 2d edn of John Inglesant (1881?).
Stevenson, Robert Louis. "A Humble Remonstrance," and "A Gossip on Romance," from Memories and Portraits . Also "A Note on Realism," from Essays Literary and Critical.
Week 5
2 July 2002
Chase, Richard, from The American Novel and Its Tradition
Baym, Nina. "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors."
Also "Concepts of the Romance in Hawthorne's America." 19th C Fiction 38:426-43. (Available online through JSTOR)
Bell, Michael Davitt, from The Development of American Romance.
de Lauretis, Teresa. "Desire in Narrative," in Alice Doesn't.
Sedgwick, Eve. Introduction and Chapter 1 (very brief) to Between Men.
Jameson, Frederic, "On Interpretation" and "Magical Narratives" in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act . NY: Cornell, 1981.
Week 6
9 July 2002
[Wilde, Oscar?], and others unknown. Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal, a Physiological Romance of Today. 1893. London: GMP, 1986.
Sedgwick, Eve, "Some Binarisms II" from Epistemology of the Closet , on Wilde.
Woolf, Virginia. "Romance and the Heart." Review of The Grand Tour , by Romer Wilson, and Revolving Lights , by Dorothy Richardson. From The Nation and the Athenaeum , May 19, 1923. (Online).
Woolf, A Room of One's Own .
Rand, Erica, from Barbie's Queer Accessories , TBD.
Elam, Diane. Chapter 1 from Romancing the Postmodern . NY: Routledge, 1992.
Requirements for the course:
20-pp researched critical paper due Tuesday, 23 July 2002. I will review a draft if submitted electronically before 16 July 2002.
No weekly written responses, but come prepared with 3 good discussion questions ("threads") and a thesis.
Week 5: construct and present an annotated bibliography on one of the following terms/concepts:
Heroic romance
Historical romance
Gothic romance
Realism vs. romance
Grades must be submitted to the registrar by Friday, 16 Aug 2002
20% participation
20% weekly responses
20% bibliography/presentation
40% final paper