With the help of recent movies, Jane Austen has been pigeonholed as a sweet isolate writing timeless, crowd-pleasing romances. Yet she wrote in an age of visionary extravagance. We will read her five loved novels in reflation to contemporary works like Mary Wollstonecrafts MARIA and VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN, Walter Scotts THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMORE, Mary Shelleys FRANKENSTEIN, and Maturins MELMOTH THE WANDERER, works that oscillate between Utopianism and spiritual despair. We shall explore ways in which Jane Austen quietly shares the bold visions of her contemporaries, if she does.

There will be a midterm and perhaps a final, and a paper.