English
141: The Eighteenth-Century Novel
Fall 2003, Tu., Th. 2-3:15 Professor Leah Price
1 Bow St., Rm 330 6-0573
Office hours: Mon 4-5, Tu. 3.15-4, Barker 271 lprice@fas.harvard.edu www.fas.harvard.edu/~lprice
Tu 16 Sept. Introduction
Handout: definitions, debates and title-pages
Th 18 Sept. What is a novel?
Samuel Johnson, Rambler 4, pp. 9-13 [handout]
Tu 23 Sept. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1-40
Th 25 Sept. Crusoe, 41-162 [response paper on Crusoe due]
Tu 30 Sept. Crusoe, 163-220
Th 2 Oct Richardson, Pamela, 1-91
Tu 7Oct. Pamela, 91-301 [response paper on Pamela due]
Th 9 Oct. Pamela, 301-412
Tu 14 Oct. Fielding, *Shamela (complete)
Th 16 Oct. *Shamela (continued; begin reading Tom Jones)
Tu 21 Oct. Fielding, Tom Jones (Books 1-3) [response paper on Tom Jones due]
Th 23 Oct. Tom Jones (Books 4-7)
Tu 28 Oct. Tom Jones (Books 8-15)
Tu 4 Nov. Tom Jones (Books 16-18)
Th 6 Nov. MIDTERM
Tu 11 Nov. University holiday.
Th 13 Nov. Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Vol. I-II)
Tu 18 Nov CLASS MEETING IN HOUGHTON LIBRARY
Th 20 Nov. CLASS MEETING IN HOUGHTON LIBRARY
Tu 25 Nov. Tristram Shandy (Vol. III-V) [response paper on Tristram Shandy due]
Th 27 Nov. Thanksgiving holiday.
Tu 1 Dec. Tristram Shandy (Vol. VI-IX)
Th 4 Dec. Austen, Northanger Abbey (Vol. 1)
*Austen, "Plan of a Novel"
Tu 9 Dec. Northanger Abbey (complete) [response paper on Northanger Abbey due]
Th 11 Dec. Northanger Abbey, continued
Tu 16
Dec. Conclusions [handout: how to end a novel]
Requirements:
active and informed class participation; five 2-pp. response papers
due on the dates indicated; midterm and occasional reading quizzes;
10-12-pp. paper due Jan. 5.
* = reading in coursepack. If you miss the first day of class, be
sure to pick up the Johnson handout and the definitions handout from
outside Barker 271.
English
141
REQUIREMENTS:
Short response papers (1 ½-2 1/2-pp., typed, double-spaced), due
on the dates specified on the syllabus. Papers must be word-processed
and handed in at the beginning of class (no email submissions
accepted). Response papers may explore any aspect of the text that
strikes you as interesting or puzzling, contrast the current week's
text with one read earlier in the semester, choose a passage of the
text to close-read, or raise questions that you would like to develop
in a final paper or to discuss in class. They may also offer a
pastiche or parody of the text or engage imaginatively with some
aspect of the text's form or content. Because these papers are
designed as warmup for class discussion, they must examine the text
assigned for the day on which they are due (rather than the previous
week's); for the same reason, extensions will not be given on
response papers under any circumstances. Response papers will not be
individually graded, but may be used as a starting-point for class
discussion and will contribute to your grade for class participation
(25%).
Midterm exam (Th 6 Nov.) plus (if necessary) occasional unannounced
reading quizzes (25%)
--10-12-pp. paper, due Jan. 5 by 5:00 in Prof. Price's mailbox on the
first floor of the English Department (50%). A final paper submitted
late without advance permission will be penalized by 1/3 of a grade
per day (e.g., a B+ paper becomes a B).
Eighteenth-century novels are exceptionally gripping,
thought-provoking, and playful; they are also exceptionally LONG. No
previous coursework in the English department is required for the
course (and interested freshmen as well as non-majors are welcome),
but you should enroll only if you are prepared to keep up with the
reading (an average of 250 pages per week) and with 2-pp. response
papers due roughly every other week. Because this is a
lecture-discussion class rather than a formal lecture course, active
and informed contribution to class discussion is expected from all
students.
--My office hours are Mondays 4-5 and Tuesdays 3.15-4 in Barker 271;
no appointment is needed. All members of the class are encouraged
(though by no means required) to come to office hours at least once
in the semester, either to discuss paper ideas, to follow up on
questions raised in class, or simply to talk about any aspect of the
novels that interests them.
--This is a lecture-discussion course with no separate section; the
writing tutor is Michelle Syba , 617-254-8978 (until 10 PM), office
hours Mon. 11-1 in Barker 421. Students should fee free to come to
her office hours as well, to discuss paper topics or to talk about
the reading more generally.
Novels ordered at the Co-op (please buy these editions unless you own
another already):
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Norton)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Houghton Mifflin)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Penguin)
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Oxford UP)
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford UP)
On the syllabus, readings marked with an asterisk (*) are contained
in the coursepack, for sale at Gnomon Copy (1304 Mass. Ave, next to
Toscanini's.) The coursepack contains:
[Henry Fielding,] Shamela (1741)
Jane
Austen, "Plan of a Novel"
SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Some relevant secondary sources are listed below, and have been
placed on reserve for English 141 at Lamont and Hilles; you may find
these interesting to browse among as you write the second paper.
On the novel:
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957)
Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English
Novel (Columbia UP, 1983)
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History
of the Novel (Oxford UP, 1987)
William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel
Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley: U California P,
1998)
Anthologies of primary texts:
Ioan Williams, Novel and Romance, 1700-1800. A Documentary
Record (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)
(eighteenth-century theories of the novel)
Vivien Jones, ed. Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (Routledge, 1990)
(An anthology of non-fictional primary texts: letters, educational treatises, conduct books, etc.)
Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The Sublime: a Reader (Cambridge UP, 1996)
(excerpts eighteenth-century writings on esthetic theory and on landscape)
Roger Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse
(good to browse in if you want a larger sense of eighteenth-century literature and culture)
Historical
and cultural contexts:
Linda Colley Britons. Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (Yale UP,
1992)
(political history)
Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1982)
(social and economic history)
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London: Harper Collins, 1997)
(cultural history)
The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (London: Methuen, 1987)
(literary criticism, including essays on Fielding)
English
141
The Eighteenth-Century Novel
Prof. Leah Price
English 141 covers the rise of the novel through eighteenth-century
fiction by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane
Austen. Written at a time when the word "novel" had not yet come to
refer to a stable category whose limits readers and writers could
agree upon, these early fictions are experimental, adventurous,
metafictional. Each one plays with different ways of representing
consciousness; each one tests out the advantages and disadvantages of
competing narrative techniques. Because they take these kinds of
risks, early novels force us to think about what we expect of the
genre - what kinds of information we expect fiction to give and
withhold, what conventions for representing the world we take for
granted. (This makes eighteenth-century novels a thought-provoking
model for twenty-first century readers who write fiction
themselves.)
The lack of any consensus about what the term "novel" meant forced
eighteenth-century writers and readers to face fundamental questions
- questions about genre (what distinguishes novels from epics,
romances, newspapers, correspondences, biography, pornography?),
modernity (what was novel about the novel?), the gothic (why did the
Age of Enlightenment see the rise of the ghost story?), gender (when
did the novel become a genre written and read by women?) and
technique (does the first person or the third person give most
immediate access to characters' consciousness? why did the past tense
become the default setting for story-telling, in the eighteenth
century and since?).
Each of the novels read in this course engages in a dialogue with
others, working out (or sometimes fighting out) what exactly a novel
should do (or not do) to its readers. The course begins with
Robinson Crusoe, which we'll read in tandem with a series of
eighteenth-century debates about the effects of fiction-reading: What
makes readers care about words on a page? Does identification with
fictional characters educate or corrupt them? (Eighteenth-century
critics described novel-reading at once as a form of moral or
intellectual training and as an incitement to vices ranging from
introspection to laziness to adultery to masturbation.) Do we read to
understand life or to escape it? How do women read differently from
men, or teenagers from adults? Next we'll read Samuel Richardson's
claustrophobic tale of sexual power reversals, Pamela, side by
side with Shamela, Henry Fielding's devastating parody, and
Tom Jones, Fielding's more serious attempt to think out an
alternative model of how a novel could represent an entire society
and how stories could change their readers. Richardson and Fielding
grapple with the same basic problem - how can a printed page give
readers the illusion of inhabiting another human being's mind? - but
answer it in radically different ways, with starkly different
implications not only for sexual politics but for the future of
fiction. Toward the end of the course, we'll turn to Tristram Shandy
- a playfully and sometimes maddeningly experimental text full of
blank pages, black pages, and deliberately misnumbered chapters - to
ask what difference it makes that novels take the form of printed
books. (How does a printed novel differ from an oral folktale or a
handwritten narrative?) We'll try to answer some of these questions
in more detail through two hands-on sessions in Houghton Library,
which will give students the chance to work with eighteenth-century
newspapers, advertisements, and engravings, as well as with first
editions of the novels that we've read earlier in the semester. We'll
conclude with Jane Austen's early novel Northanger Abbey,
which plays with several of the questions that will have been
explored all semester: how do people read novels differently from
other texts? do women read differently from men, and is there
anything especially formative (whether for good or evil) about the
reading that takes place in adolescence? what exactly do readers want
out of novels, and can they - or we - get it?