Loading...
ENGL 190-02, Novel of Manners, Fall 2008
Brady, Jennifer
Brady, Jennifer
Citations
Altmetric:
Contributor
Photographer
Author
Artist
Editor
Advisor
Keywords
English, Department of, Syllabus, Curriculum, Academic departments, Text, 2008 Fall
Local ID
Collections
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.
Description
This syllabus was submitted to the Office of Academic Affairs by the course instructor.