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This course will explore perceptions of women in American and British literature of the nineteenth century, a period witnessing the fledgling women’s rights movement, the end of slavery in the United States, and advances in the education and professional life of women. The focus of the course will be controversies arising as a result of volatile alterations in the construction of gender—that is, changes in the roles women chose for themselves and changes thrust upon them. For instance, why did the thoughts and behavior of the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening shock America at the end of the 19th century? These and other questions will be debated in a course whose reading will include works by Emily Dickenson, Margaret Fuller, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Rider Haggard, and Oscar Wilde. A reader will be available, but students should purchase the following at the university bookstore or an internet source. All of these texts are available free online if you do not wish to buy them:
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Oscar Wilde, Plays (1891-1895) |
