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The English Novel and the World cancelled

ENGL 103.602
instructor(s):
Tuesday 5-8:00

 

While our first impression of the English novel might call up associations of marriage plots and insular country houses, the English novel has long been concerned with the wider world, and England’s place within it. In this course we will explore these concerns, reading novels that imagine the peoples and plots of faraway places or trace the circuits of emigration and empire that link those places to home. We will explore not only how London itself is a world-city, but how even the purportedly isolated country-house is connected to the world. We will read novels such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, exploring how they imagine the wider world and negotiate the threats, possibilities, and lessons that it might offer to an English reading audience. Assignments for this course will include several short papers, a class presentation, and a final essay which revises and expands on earlier work.

 

fulfills requirements
Sector 5: 19th Century Literature of the Standard Major
Sector 6: 20th Century Literature of the Standard Major