ENGL 190-02, Novel of Manners, Fall 2008

Abstract

This course is a study of the development of the novel of manners over a century, as reflected in the work of those writers most identified with the genre: Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. We move from the heroine-centered courtship plots of Austen’s fiction, set in Regency England, through Edith Wharton and Henry James’s adaptations of the genre in the late nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth century. We will also read Veblen’s classic economic study of the leisure class as the lens through which we will interpret the novels of Edith Wharton, set in America’s Gilded Age, the era of conspicuous consumption. The course treats three major novelists, one English and two American, and considers the strong influence English novels of the nineteenth century had on the cosmopolitan American writers who spent most of their careers writing their fiction in Europe. The novels in this course, largely traditional in structure,focus on the implications of the assumption Lawrence Selden makes in The House of Mirth: that marriage is the heroine’s vocation.