Department of English

I intend this to function as a true seminar, which is to say, wholly to be motivated by the interests of the students enrolled in it. Its only guidelines are the general rubric of its title and the inclusive dates of approximately the half century between 1775 and 1825. Among possible topics are:

1) the Bluestockings
2) provincial female coteries
3) female conduct books/ideas of education
4) feminist agitation of the 1780s-90s
5) the masculinist backlash
6) women authors and (male) genres / male authors and (female) genres
7) gay, lesbian, bisexual cultural encodings
8) war and its effects (macho men, bereft widows, orphans)
9) theater and performance
10) the poetess and poetasters
11) the angel in the house
12) women's occupations, experiences
13) how any author, major or minor, relates to a complex of gender issues
14) the (ab/pre) sense of sexuality in the period
15) male / female bondings
16) ETC.
I invite further suggestions as well as specific subjects of critical/scholarly concern from those who might be interested in this seminar. Please keep in mind, at least to some extent, the availability of texts, especially with longer works (though, if this consideration means we find ourselves constrained to the tried, the true, and the safe, we'll find a way around it).