ENGL 221-01, Novel of Manners, Spring 2013

Abstract

This course is a study of the development of the novel of manners, as reflected in the work of the most important writers identified with the genre, Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. The novels in this course, largely traditional in structure, focus on courtship, gender, class privilege and the economic practices of the leisure class. This course has several principal goals: to introduce students to the conventions of the genre of the novel of manners; to consider the ways in which novelists rework, revise, and even undo their own work over their careers and respond in complex ways to the influence exerted on them by their precursors and contemporaries; to study influential works by major novelists, one English, two American.