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ENGL 221-01/02, Novel of Manners, Fall 2010
Brady, Jennifer
Brady, Jennifer
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English, Department of, Syllabus, Curriculum, Academic departments, Text, 2010 Fall
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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 read Veblen’s classic economic study of the leisure class as the lens through which we will interpret Wharton’s fiction set in America’s Gilded Age, the era of conspicuous consumption. The course explores the influence the English realist novel of the nineteenth century had on two American writers who spent most of their careers in Europe. The novels in this course, largely traditional in plot and structure, focus on the implications of the assumption Lawrence Selden makes in Wharton’s The House of Mirth: that marriage is the heroine’s vocation.
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The course has three principal goals: to introduce students to the conventions of the novel of manners; to consider the ways in which novelists revise their own work over the course of their careers and respond to the influence of their precursors and contemporaries; to study important works by three major novelists, one English, two American.
English 221 carries both F4 (Literary Texts) and F2 (Writing Intensive) credit. We will workshop samples of the first two essays, focusing on issues of revision, clarity of argument, and uses of textual evidence in formal essay writing, in addition to more technical aspects, including punctuation and grammar.
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This syllabus was submitted to the Office of Academic Affairs by the course instructor. Uploaded by Archives RSA Josephine Hill.