ENL 4112 Fall 2024 - Ward

Yes!!! Novels were written and read well before the works of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters! In fact, novels were so popular they were considered dangerous reading--a cursed itch that had to be scratched. This course will introduce you to a variety of eighteenth-century novels and the opportunity to learn about the material and cultural contexts in which they were produced. What literary historians call the “rise of the novel,” for instance, coincided with the rise of colonialism and capitalism as dominant global forces; this resulted in novels that mirrored and produced the culture from which they emerged. In other words, the eighteenth-century narratives we will read both reflected and shaped the entangled histories of the English-language novel, the rise of Britain’s colonial empire, the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, and the revolutionary social reform movements of the same period. Required texts include: Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, Aphra Behn; Fantomina, Eliza Haywood; Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe; Pamela, Samuel Richardson; The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last, Sarah Fielding; A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald; Caleb Williams, William Godwin; Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft; Obi; The History of Three-Fingered Jack, William Earle; and Woman of Colour, Anonymous.

This course fills the pre1800 requirement and the genre requirement (novel).