Course Description:

During the Nineteenth Century, cultural conversations regarding the changing roles of women were generally known as falling under "The Woman Question" in both the United States and England. Such cultural issues in both countries were inextricably linked as periodicals from both countries regularly crossed "the pond" and novels achieving any kind of success on side of Atlantic were quickly published on the other. Discussions of the Woman Question were particularly transatlantic in nature as each country sought to define its specific notion of womanhood and, through that notion, itself as a nation.

In fiction and the periodical press, writers entered into ongoing debates on a variety of issues concerning women, including women's role in marriage, legal status, and access to education. Critically, the discourse surrounding this debate also reflected and inflected each country's broader cultural discourses of race, class, and nation. Thus as we seek to understand both the nuances of the Woman Question in a transatlantic context, we shall consider American and British authors in terms of these issues so as to get a sense of the larger conversations taking place. We shall focus on the rise of first-wave feminism in the nineteenth-century. Though the entire Nineteenth Century concerns itself with defining womanhood, this class will largely focus on the latter half of the century in order to read in greater depth and remain sensitive to specific historical contexts.

The goal of this course is encourage an understanding of each individual work within the larger context of Anglo-American literature and, by doing so, learn how to read poetry, drama, and fiction critically. Since literature reveals the workings of culture, we shall endeavor to create an ongoing conversation on the nature of those workings as we piece together the conversation in which the work itself participates through both in-class discussions and weekly written responses. In order to communicate these interpretations, we will also focus on how to write about literature. Thus the goal in this endeavor is to construct essays that write about these genres in a thoughtful, convincing, and effective manner.