English 239WH - Worthy Hearts and Saucy Wits

Eighteenth-century England witnessed the birth of the novel, a genre that in its formative years was both lauded for its originality and condemned as intellectually and morally dangerous, especially for young women. We will trace the numerous prose genres that influenced early novelists, including conduct manuals, epistolary writing, conversion narratives, travelogues, romance, and the gothic. In doing so, we will concomitantly examine the novel's immense formal experimentation alongside debates about developing notions of gender and class as well as the feeling, thinking individual. Authors may include Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Walpole, Burney, and others.

Course limited to sophomores, juniors and seniors