This course looks at comedy in drama, novels, and films from Classical Greece to the twentieth century. Focusing on examples from Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Wilde, Chaplin, and Billy Wilder, along with theoretical contexts, the class examines comedy as a transgressive mode with revolutionary social and political implications. This is a Communications Intensive (CI) class with emphasis on discussion, and frequent, short essays.

Great Writers Inspire presents an illuminating collection of Jane Austen resources curated by specialists at the University of Oxford. It includes audio and video lectures and short talks, downloadable electronic texts and eBooks, and background contextual resources.

This collection of resources looks at the simmering debate between science and natural theology raged across the Victorian period and it's influence on literature.

In the Victorian era, Gothic fiction had ceased to be a dominant literary genre. However,the Gothic tropes used earlier in the eighteenth century in texts such as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho were transported and interwoven into many late-nineteenth century narratives. These tropes included psychological and physical terror; mystery and the supernatural; madness, doubling, and heredity curses. This collection of resources looks at Gothic fiction.

This course investigates the uses and boundaries of fiction in a range of novels and narrative styles–traditional and innovative, western and nonwestern–and raises questions about the pleasures and meanings of verbal texts in different cultures, times, and forms. Toward the end of the term, we will be particularly concerned with the relationship between art and war in a diverse selection of works.

This course studies several important examples of the genre that between the early 18th century and the end of the 20th has come to seem the definitive literary form for representing and coming to terms with modernity. Syllabi vary, but the class usually attempts to convey a sense of the form’s development over the past few centuries. Among topics likely to be considered are: developments in narrative technique, the novel’s relation to history, national versus linguistic definitions of an “English” novel, social criticism in the novel, realism versus “romance,” the novel’s construction of subjectivities. Writers studied have included Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Lawrence Sterne, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie.

In this class, you will read, think about, and (I hope) enjoy important examples of what has become one of the most popular literary genres today, if not the most popular: the novel. Some of the questions we will consider are: Why did so many novels appear in the eighteenth century? Why were they—and are they—called novels? Who wrote them? Who read them? Who narrates them? What are they likely to be about? Do they have distinctive characteristics? What is their relationship to the time and place in which they appeared? How have they changed over the years? And, most of all, why do we like to read them so much?

Though the era of British Romanticism (ca. 1790-1830) is sometimes exclusively associated with the poetry of these years, this period was just as importantly a time of great innovation in British prose fiction. Romantic novelists pioneered or revolutionized several genres, including social/philosophical problem novels, tales of sentiment and sensibility, and the historical novel. Writing in the years of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the early industrial revolution, these writers conveyed a spirit of chaos and upheaval even in stories whose settings are seemingly farthest removed from those cataclysmic historical events. In this year’s offering of “Major English Novels,” we will read of plagues, wars, hysterics, monsters and more in novels by authors including William Godwin, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. In the final weeks of the semester, we will read one major novel of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, in light of these earlier texts. There will be two essay assignments, one 5-7 pages and one 8-10 pages in length, and required presentations.

This course introduces prose narrative, both short stories and the novel. It examines the construction of narrative and the analysis of literary response.

Classic novels like Pride and Prejudice and Anne of Green Gables have been around for a long time. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of these classics in a new way.

This pass/fail seminar should be a fun setting where we can all enjoy a love of good books together. Students will read approximately one novel every two weeks, and the class will discuss each novel in a relaxed and interactive setting, with attention to whatever themes and issues interest them most about each book. We will read a wide mixture of classic and contemporary novels written by women, including: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Sheri Reynolds, The Rapture of Canaan; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; and Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. Recurrent issues likely to be discussed include: gender, race, and class; romance, love, and marriage; depression and suicide; and conception, childbirth, and parenthood.