Novel Forums: Women Writers and the Development of the Novel (Junior Tutorial)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2019

In Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s objection to Captain Harville—that men have “had every advantage” in writing about men and women both—might equally be applied to the early discourse of “the rise of the novel,” which, for decades, ignored most women writers except Austen. Scholarship over the last half century has not only given greater critical attention to these writers, but also, as the novel’s origins have increasingly been linked with other forms—letters, essays, news, poetry, plays, etc.—so too has it called attention to women writers’ contributions in these forms.  Yet, on account of the historical prejudices of canon-making (not to mention present-day changes in reading practices), these contributions remain in a precarious place.  This tutorial takes seriously eighteenth century women writers, the multifaceted history of the novel, and the relations between these two categories in light of the critical challenges of canon formation.  As a deconstruction of the ordinary “rise of the novel” narrative, it is structured around three intertwining principles: 1) to read important literary texts by women writers through the long eighteenth century, of greater and lesser degrees of canonicity; 2) to investigate the cultural, literary, and historical contexts of these works—often in the form of authors directly or indirectly responding to one another; 3) to pursue original interpretations of texts and contexts by reading them with respect to several different critical theories and methodologies.

creighton_long_18c_women_writers_4.0.pdf632 KB