31146 - English Literature 2 (A-L)

Course contents

The course aims to explore a range of significant fiction from the late 17th century to the late 19th century and the ways in which it develops and changes. Emphasis will be given to the rise of the novel and its relationship to other canonical and non-canonical literary forms (romance, travel narrative, essay, journals, political pamphlet, satire, and the theatre). The course will also consider issues which include the notion of the novel as a “new” literary genre, the relationship between gender and genre, the rise of the printing market, the importance of journals, the formation of the literary canon, the rise of literary criticism, and the role of women authors in shaping the novel and its ‘sub-genres’. The course will also consider the reception of the novel in relation to its historical and literary context and to its interpretation across time and space.

The course will enable students to recognise and interpret the formal features of omniscient, first person and epistolary narration; the social and cultural function of prose-writing and literature in general; the role of didacticism and its subversion in and through the novel, intertextual relations between the novels themselves. Close readings of primary sources will be accompanied by theoretical and critical analysis.

The following authors, and their texts, will be analysed in their literary and historical context and in relationships to issues of gender, race and class:

Mothers of the Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688);

Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders and the picaresque novel (1722);

Models and modes of the Gothic novel: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764);

Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park 1814;

Interfacing science and literature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818);

Bildungsroman, Gothic elements and the importance of being English in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847;

 

English Literary History

The module will enable students to understand the cultural, literary and historical changes that occurred from the late seventeenth century (Restoration) to the late Victorian age. It will mainly focus on the rise of literary criticism, on the formation of the English literary canon, and on the reception of ‘ancient’ English authors and Shakespeare. Specific attention will be paid to the debates on crucial aesthetic categories at the very core of important issues such as nurture vs. nature, the beautiful vs the sublime, the city vs the countryside, the natural vs supernatural.

Readings/Bibliography

Core reading:

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1724)

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 1764

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

C. Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)

 

Literary history

Students will be required to prove their knowledge of English literature, from the restoration to the late Victorian age. Reference text: Lilla Maria Crisafulli e Keir Elam, Manuale di letteratura e cultura inglese, Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009,pp. 113-16, pp. 130-132, pp. 139- 326.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. II or The Oxford Anthology (sala consultazione - Biblioteca LLSM)

Critical Essays:

Brody Kramnick, Jonathan The Making of the English Canon, PMLA, Vol. 112, No. 5, pp. 1087-1101

Farese, Carlotta “Genre-Bending at Mansfield Park: The Remediation of Austen’s Female Characters Across Novel, Theatre and Film”, Textus, 2016, pp. 113-128

Figlerowicz, Marta 2008, “‘Frightful Spectacle of a Mangled King’: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Narration Through Theater”, in New Literary History, Vol. 39, n. 2, pp. 321-334.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of ImperialismAuthor(s)”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 1, "Race," Writing, and Difference (Autumn, 1985), pp.243-261

Gilbert S. and Gubar S., “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress”, in The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1979.

Golinelli, Gilberta “Appropriating and Remediating the Black Character in Aphra Behn’s and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko”, in Remediating Imagination. Literatures and Culture in English from the Renaissance to the Postcolonial, Gioia Angeletti, Giovanna Buonanno, Diego Saglia (eds), Roma, Carrocci, 2016, pp. 40-51.

Guilhamet, Leon, DeFoe and the Whig Novel, University of Delaware Press, 2010, pp. 112-132.

Hammond, J.R. A Defoe Companion, Palgrave Macmillan, 1993, pp. 95-105.

Litvak, Jospeh “The infection of Action: Theatricals and theatricality in Mansfield Park”, in A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION of Mansfield Park, Norton, New York, 1998.

Lloyd-Smith, Allan “This thing of Darkness”: Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in H. Bloom (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 2008, Infobase Publishing, pp. 115-132.

Mellor, Anne K. “Making a “monster”: an introduction to Frankenstein”, in The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 9-25.

Pacheco, Anita “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”, in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 34, 1994, pp. 491-506

Pollak, Ellen “Gender and fiction in Moll Flanders and Roxana, in The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, ed. by John Richetti, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, pp. 139-157.

Rosenthal, Laura “Oroonoko: Reception, Ideology, and Narrative Strategy”, in Dereck Hughes and Janet Todd (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004

Said, E. “Jane Austen and Imperialism”, in Culture and imperialism, 1993, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, pp. 80-97.

Tropp, Martin “The Monster”, in H. Bloom (ed.) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, New York : Chelsea House, 2007.

Wiltishire, John “Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion”, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

 

NB: Bibliography will be improved in due course. Students are requested to check the online programme also during the course for further notice and information. They are expected to read at least 5 of the primary texts and all the extracts analyzed during the course.

Teaching methods

The course will consist of

Frontal lessons, aiming to provide participants with the critical tools they need to interrogate and understand literary texts, both in terms of linguistic analysis and of historical/cultural contexts. Since our critical itinerary will be also cultural, the course will include the viewing and discussion of some films. Seminars offered by international and national experts

Assessment methods

The evaluation of the students' competencies and abilities acquired during the course consists in a written work at the end of the course for those students who attended classes regularly. For those who do not attend classes, the exam consists in an oral examination.

The written test is divided into two parts: the first will be made of multiple choice and short open questions concerning the literary history of the period from the Restoration to the late Victorian age; the second part will refer to the specific reading list of the syllabus.

Oral exam. Those who will not take - or who will not pass - the written test, will have to take a 25-minute oral exam in English, which will be divided into two parts. The first part will focus on the period examined during the course (from the Restoration to late Victorian Age), while the second will aim to evaluate the students' critical and methodological skills. In order to assess these skills, students will be invited to discuss the literary and critical texts that will have been presented during the course.

Those students who are able to demonstrate a wide and systematic understanding of the issues covered during classes, are able to use these critically and who master the field-specific language of the discipline will be given a mark of excellence. Those students who demonstrate a mnemonic knowledge of the subject with a more superficial analytical ability and ability to synthesize, a correct command of the language but not always appropriate, will be given a satisfactory mark. A superficial knowledge and understanding of the material, a scarce analytical and expressive ability that is not always appropriate will be rewarded with a ‘pass' mark. Students who demonstrate gaps in their knowledge of the subject matter, inappropriate language use, lack of familiarity with the literature in the program bibliography will not be given a pass mark.

Teaching tools

Frontal lessons, power point presentations and films

Office hours

See the website of Gilberta Golinelli