Course Description
An examination of eighteenth-century British literature with an emphasis on texts that represent women and investigate themes of gender, the feminine literary marketplace, and the history of women.
Athena Title
Women in Eighteenth Century
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in ENGL 4460E
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will develop a critical understanding of the relationship between gender and literature in the eighteenth century, a time period in which perceptions of gender, women, and men changed dramatically in a new era of print. The course investigates several questions surrounding the representation of women and gender: what was “modern” about eighteenth-century ideologies of gender? Which gender binaries were developed? What looks familiar to us about the period’s changing perceptions of femininity? Students will be exposed to diverse representations of women in prose, poetry, and drama, written by both women and men, as they consider how the period witnessed significant developments in professional opportunities for women, class mobility, and public discussions of education, equality, humanism, virtue, and motherhood. This chronological survey includes works by professional authors who wrote for a living (in the first period in which it was possible to do so), as well as works from visual culture, nonfiction prose, and political and legal documents. The course attends also to how perceptions of gender changed over the period. Students will produce about twenty to twenty-five pages of writing in a variety of formats that could include papers, examinations, presentations, and short responses.
Topical Outline
The course outline will vary widely from instructor to instructor. Topics will change from year to year, but could cover the following: literacy and women, publication and women writers, female literary community, gendered identities, genre and gender, anonymous publication, conduct literature, actresses and the stage, feminist scholarship, the recovery of writers and genres, autobiographical prose, amatory fiction, work and women, women’s rights, coterie writing, epistolary writing, feminist history, and the feminization of the literary marketplace.