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Jane Austen and the Creation of the Modern Novel (EAS3156)

Module aims

We will consider Austen’s importance as a writer who is fully engaged with the social and cultural issues of her own time and who responded in subtle and complex ways to the new forces of social mobility, politics, the rising professional class, and the questions of women’s rights. We will read her work in chronological order, tracing the development of her style and thought from the cheeky comedy of her juvenilia to her final novel’s rich response to Romanticism. In addition, we will examine the enduring popularity of Austen’s works today both in the original and in film adaptations, as well as examine Austen’s legacy to later writers.

ILO: Module-specific skills

• 1. demonstrate knowledge of Austen's major works and of key critical approaches to them;
• 2. discuss Austen's fiction in its historical context and in the context of its place in a developing fictional tradition;
• 3. analyse Austen's fictional techniques and demonstrate an understanding of her continuing cultural influence;

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

• 4. demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse the literature an earlier era and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context;
• 5. demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history;
• 6. demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts;

ILO: Personal and key skills

• 7. through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups;
• 8. through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose;
• 9. through research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis.

Syllabus plan

1. Introduction to the Novel: I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

2. The Gothic Novel: The Romance of the Forest, Ann Radcliffe

3. Experimenting with Narrative Styles: Austen’s Juvenilia and excerpts from The Loiterer

4. Northanger Abbey

5. Sense and Sensibility

6. Pride and Prejudice

7. Mansfield Park

8. Emma

9. Narrative Techniques

10. Persuasion

11. The Novel after Austen: The Europeans, Henry James

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Primary texts
Jane Austen's works:

Selected Letters (ed.) Vivien Jones (Oxford World's Classics)

Catharine and Other Writings (eds.) Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (Oxford World's Classics)

Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion (all Norton Critical Editions)

Henry James, The Europeans (ed.) Andrew Taylor (Penguin)

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (Vintage , or any other edition)

Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (Oxford World's Classics)

Recommended texts
The Loiterer, by the Austen Family (ed.) Robert L. Mack (Edwin Mellen Press)

Frances Burney, Cecilia (eds.) Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Oxford World's Classics)

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford World's Classics)

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford World’s Classics)

Selected secondary texts

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (eds.) Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (CUP, 1997)

A Companion to Jane Austen (eds.) Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite (Blackwell, 2009)

Peter W. Graham, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin (Ashgate, 2008)

Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (CUP, 2004)

Gina Macdonald (ed.), Jane Austen on Screen (CUP, 2003)

Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Univ. of Nebraska, 2004)

Brian C. Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (National Maritime Museum, 2005)

Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen's Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (OUP, 2005)

Ashley Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen: narrative, realism and the possibility of a happy ending

(Palgrave, 2005)

Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (CUP, 1999)

Barbara Britton Wenner, Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen (Ashgate, 2005)

Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Ohio State UP, 2006)

Module has an active ELE page?

Yes

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), via Exeter University Library Electronic Resources

The Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts Digital Collection http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html

The Republic of Pemberley http://www.pemberley.com/

The Jane Austen Society of North America http://www.jasna.org/

Persuasions On-Line http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/index.html

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

Reading for Week 1
Before the first seminar, please read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Available as distance learning?

Yes

Origin date

01/10/2011

Last revision date

28/02/2012

Key words search

Jane Austen, novel, modern, gothic, romanticism, adaptation

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