ENGL 345-01, Gender, Genre and Eighteenth Century Fiction, Spring 2008

Abstract

This class will consider a range of prose fictions in the eighteenth century by male and female authors. We will look at some of the most notable ‘canonical’ writers of the eighteenth century, such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, alongside female writers such as Eliza Haywood and Fanny Burney. And we will consider what many of critics have called the ‘prehistory’ of the modern novel: the coming-into-being of a distinct fictional narrative, which locates meaningful experience in the local, present, actual and familiar aspects of everyday life, and which validates the perspective of what John Richetti has called ‘a newly conceptualized modern individual’. In this sense, the ‘novel’ seems to mark out a literary response to profound social and cultural changes, and the impact that such changes might have had on the moral and social coordinates of individual identity.