ENGL 221-01, Novel of Manners, Spring 2009

Abstract

This course is a study of the novel of manners over a century -- from 1813 to 1913 – in the fiction of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. We move from the heroine-centered courtship plots of Austen’s fiction, set in Regency England, through Wharton and James’s adaptations of the genre in the late nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth century. We will read Veblen’s classic economic study of the leisure class as the lens through which we will interpret Wharton’s novels, many of them set in America’s Gilded Age, the era of conspicuous consumption. 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. This course has these principal goals: to introduce students to the conventions of the genre; to consider the ways in which novelists revise their own work over their careers and respond in complex ways to the influence exerted on them by their precursors and contemporaries; to consider the evolution of the novel of manners over time and across national boundaries. This is a course, then, in authorial selfrevision, in literary influence, and in the study of an important novelistic genre.