English 239 - Topic: When Families Attack

Although nineteenth-century political economists and social theorists often invoked the family as the building block of social organization, novelists paradoxically persisted in portraying families that were anything but exemplary. In this course we will explore how literary representations of families articulate and resist ideas of class, gender, privacy, and identity. We will track the evolving concept of family in novels by Austen, E. Bronte, Gaskell, A. Trollope, and Dickens to investigate how familial power dynamics function in opposition to or connivance with larger social networks and structures.

Course limited to sophomores, juniors and seniors Prereq: English 200