Critics and popular readers alike have long seen the novel as a genre that aptly represented nineteenth-century Britain in its complexities and contradictions: its aspirations to inclusivity and its hierarchies of class, race, and gender; its conservatism and its openness to innovation; its interest in individualism and the comfort it found in social order. This class will focus on British nineteenth-century fiction as a form that could contain and express such conflicting impulses and values. Although we will read works by some of the best-known novelists of the era, we will also be interested in counterpointing them with work by other writers, including some who might stretch the bounds of nineteenth-century Britishness altogether. Other texts will include readings in theory and history relevant to these novels and the issues they raise.

 

• Austen, Mansfield Park (Broadview* 9781551110981)
• Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (Broadview* 9781551111766)
• Gaskell, North and South (Norton 9780393979084)
• Philip, Emmanuel Appadocca (U of Massachusetts Press 9781558490765)
• Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Broadview* 9781551114675)
• Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Penguin 9780140434972)
• Levy, The Romance of a Shop (Broadview* 9781551115665)
• Satthianadhan, Kamala (online)