Jane Austen

Guidelines and requirements for your term paper have been posted; you should familiarize yourself with them.

Be sure to consult the Course Outline, with its listing of readings and seminar reports.

Be sure to consult the list of Recommended and Reserved Books, in connection with your seminar reports and term paper.

Information on the Final Examination is now posted.

First Assignment:

If you can do so in time, read both the "Book Club Reading Guide" (below right), especially the interview with Helen Fielding, and "Contemporary debates in Jane Austen studies" (below right), in preparation for our first class meeting on Tuesday, January 5th.

Second Assignment:

Read the essay (below left bottom) on "Reader Response to Jane Austen's Novels" along with Jane Austen's "Letters" pp. 333-43 in the Longman Critical edition of Pride and Prejudice for our second class meeting on January 7.

Third Assignment:

Read "Samuel Johnson on the Novel" (below left bottom) for our third class on January 12. Make sure you have read Pride and Prejudice.

"Can it be possible that he will marry her?" Elizabeth Bennett's anxious question is the wellspring of all Jane Austen's plots. It calls attention to this author's pre-occupation with male and female desire, and suggests the inextricable connection between desire and reading in our own experience of her novels. Will he propose? Will she accept? We all want to know, and wonder whenever the answer to either question is "No".

In this course we will engage in reading the six major novels of Jane Austen. We will pay particular attention to motives for love and marriage, to class and wealth, to the roles available to women at the time, to versions of masculinity, and to the cultural context (both material and literary) of these novels. The enduring popularity of these works will also cause us to consider the relation between Jane Austen and her readers.

Our study in this seminar will proceed through discussion and the occasional lecture. Performance will be assessed on the basis of a term essay, class participation, and a final examination.

Book List:

(required -- you must buy each one because they contain essential background material we will be using in class)

Northanger Abbey: a Longman Cultural edition. Longman 2004.

Pride and Prejudice: a Longman Cultural edition. Longman 2002.

(recommended -- you can use any edition of the following; I chose these because they we got a package discount)

Sense and Sensibility. Broadview Press 2001.

Emma. Broadview Press 2004.

Mansfield Park. Broadview Press 2001.

Persuasion. Broadview Press 1998.