Department of English

Description: Taking a variety of approaches to exemplary British novels, we will consider how developments in the novel offer a history of our own values. We will focus in particular on changing expectations, definitions, and expressions of personal happiness in the context of fiction's developing constructions of aspects of the self (such as childhood, the body, the psyche, and sexuality) and of social institutions (such as education, marriage, nation, and maternity). Reading novels by Fielding, Richardson, Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Carroll, Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf, and Rhys, and looking at developments in fiction's form and content, we will inquire into the relationship between narrative representation and our experience of self-identity and pleasure. Requirements include four short papers and a final exam.

The usual English 203 requirement may be met by students choosing two of these three course: English 45, 55, 65.