| The Eighteenth-Century British Novel (8420) | ||
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SAC 427 / 610-519-4642 / scott.black@villanova.edu This seminar will introduce some of the important novels of eighteenth-century England and some of the currently influential accounts of the "Rise of the Novel." We will consider the novels in terms of both the form’s internal history (its formal innovations, what it requires of the reader, how it serves its cultural function) and its external history (its place in various histories of modernity, how it was shaped by these changes, what function it serves). And we’ll look at some of the recent critical discussions about these issues, examining the various ways critics have construed the relationships between the evolving form and other social, political, and cultural developments. By so situating the novels within the framework of current literary historical debates about what literature meant in the eighteenth-century, we will examine how critical arguments are made, as well as stressing the interaction between academic problems in literary history and the readerly pleasures of the text. We will try to account for the multi-valenced way that the novels functioned within their worlds, as both tools and games, as new means of understanding and new forms of play—and also see what they might have to do with our purportedly post-eighteenth-century world. Texts (available in bookstore): Each week, alongside the primary text, we’ll read some of the most important recent criticism about the text. These required essays should be read, ideally, after the novel. In addition, other critical essays are recommended (listed in order of recommendation) each week. These will provide deeper background on the novel, the context, or the critic, and will be useful to those presenting or writing on—or those simply interested in—the given novel. All of the criticism is available on reserve in the library; a complete list follows the syllabus. Requirements will include a running critical journal (consisting of weekly
responses to the readings: usually but not necessarily an engagement with the
critic’s approach to the novel), an in-class presentation (approx. 10 min.,
with notes/outline to be handed in), a response to a colleague’s presentation
(approx. 5 min.), and an independently researched seminar paper (with proposal,
bibliography, and draft due along the way). Finally—to stress the obvious—the
seminar will rise or fall based on the active, enthusiastic, and brilliant participation
of all its members; such participation is expected and required. 9/6: Labor Day: no class 9/13: Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (1719) 9/20: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) 9/27: Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740), vol 1 10/4: Pamela, vol 2 10/11: Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741) 10/18: fall break: no class 10/25: Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742), bks 1-2 11/1: Joseph Andrews, bks 3-4 11/8: Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768) 11/15: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) 11/22: Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778), vols 1-2 11/29: Evelina, vol 3 12/13: Northanger Abbey / What is the novel? Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987) Ballaster, Ros, Seductive Forms (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) Bahktin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981) "Cambridge": Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996) Gallagher, Catherine, Nobody’s Story (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1994) Kroll, Richard, ed., The English Novel: 1700-Fielding (New York: Longman, 1998) ("Kroll 1") Kroll, Richard, ed., The English Novel: Smollett to Austin (New York: Longman, 1998) ("Kroll 2") Kundera, Milan, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper, 1996) McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987) Pocock, J.G.A., "The Mobility of Property," in Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) Richetti, John, The English Novel in History 1700-1784 (New York: Routledge, 1999) Warner, William, Licensing Entertainment (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998) Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957) |
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