2024-25

Convenor and seminar tutor - Dr Emma Francis

Overview

This module explores aspects of the political and intellectual provenance of a range of 19^th century feminisms and their impact upon British literary culture in the period. We move from a starting point of the feminisms produced by the battle between conservative and radical political thought at the turn of the 19^th century through the feminisms of the mid-century, which looked to liberalism and related positions to legitimate their arguments, to the diversification of feminist debates through the lenses of Darwinism, socialism, new discourses about gender and sexuality, and discussions around the significance of the city at the end of the 19^th century. The module constructs a dialogue between 19^th century literary texts and 19^th century 'woman question' thinking, and the way in which these relationships have been understood in the late 20^th and 21^st centuries by historians, historiographers and literary critics.

SYLLABUS:

• Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary feminisms and their literatures, 1790-1830
• Women’s poetry and woman’s mission: the woman writer’s ‘proper sphere’, 1802-65
• Liberalism, Unitarianism and feminism: the limits of the novel, 1840-69
• Sensation, socialism, science and sexual deviance, 1862-89
• The ‘New Woman’, 1890-99

ASSESSMENT:

Those taking the module in their intermediate year (level 5) will write a 3,500 word essay from a supplied list of questions (see below) and take a closed 2 hour examination paper in the summer term.

Essay Questions 2024-5

1. Discuss the similarities AND/OR differences between the thought of Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft.

2. Discuss the depiction of servants AND/OR the working poor in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft AND/OR Hannah More.

3. 'The separate spheres'... How useful is this concept in understanding the representation of women in the texts considered during term 1 of our module?

4. Discuss the terms in which two or more writers of our period represent the rational heroine.

5. How much faith did woman question thinkers have in marriage during our period? To what extent were alternative family and relationship models envisaged?

6. Write an essay on the exploration of sensibility AND/OR gothic in two or more texts.

7. What does the figure of the Creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein have to say to the agendas and assumptions of Mary Wollstonecraft's work?

8. Discuss some of the ways in which Christianity is appealed to by woman question thinkers.

9. Does women's Abolitionist poetry appeal to the emotions or the reason of its readers? Discuss at least two poets.

10. Compare and contrast the representation of motherhood in two or more texts.

11. Why was Germaine de Stael's Corinne so inspirational for British women writers of the 19th century?

12. Discuss the strains the form of the novel comes under from the attempt to articulate middle-class women's experience.

Those taking the module in their final year (level 6) will write a 4,500 word essay on a question they will devise themselves in consultation with me and a closed 2 hour examination paper in the summer term. Please ensure that you preserve an email trail proving that I have approved the wording of your self-devised question. Examination preparation sessions will be held in the first two weeks of the summer term.

N.B. AI is forbidden on this module - the use of it in any shape or form will result in investigation and penalty.

Critical sources

Below is a sample of useful critical texts that speak to significant aspects of the module (all available in e-source via the Library). As you develop your essays you should consult me for other recommendations of additional critical sources tailored to your particular project.

Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832-1898. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995
Deborah Weiss, The female philosopher and her afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British novel, and the transformations of feminism, 1796-1811. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017
Eileen Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights. Yale University Press, 2016.
Joseph Morrissey, Women's domestic activity in the Romantic-period novel, 1770-1820: dangerous occupations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Lyn Pykett, The 'Improper' Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Yale Nota Bene, 2000.
Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993
The Cambridge companion to nineteenth-century thought, edited by Gregory Claeys. Cambridge University Press, 2019
The Cambridge companion to Victorian women's writing, edited by Linda H. Peterson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
The Cambridge history of nineteenth-century political thought, edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
The Oxford handbook of Victorian literary culture, edited by Juliet John. Oxford University Press, 2016
Victorian women writers and the woman question, edited by Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Claudia L. Johnson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011
The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830-1880, edited by Lucy Hartley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Carmen Casaliggi, ‘Domestic Cosmopolitanism in Germaine de Stael’s Coppet and in Corinne, or Italy’ Women’s Writing Volume 27, Number 1, February 2020
Robert Castillo, The Empire of Stereoptypes: Germaine de Stael and the Idea of Italy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

SET TEXTS:

The following texts should be acquired, preferably in the recommended editions. A few additional set texts - 5 poems and 1 essay - are supplied in electronic form via the links on the Syllabus tab, which contains the running order and plan for each section of the module.

• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility [1811] (ed. Ros Ballaster, Penguin, 2003)
• Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did [1895] (ed. Nicholas Ruddick, Broadview: 2004)
• Charlotte Brontë, Villette [1853] (ed. Helen Cooper, Penguin: 2002)
• Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up As A Flower [1867] (ed. Pamela Gilbert, Broadview: 2010)
• Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South [1855] (ed. Patricia Ingram, Penguin: 1996)
• George Gissing, The Odd Women [1893] (ed. Patricia Ingram, OUP: 2000)
• Margaret Harkness A City Girl [1887] (ed. Deborah Mutch, Victorian Secrets: 2015)
• Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs [1888] (ed. Susan Bernstein, Broadview: 2006)
• Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife [1809] (Broadview: 2003)
• John Stuart Mill, ‘On the Subjection of Women’ [1869] (Broadview: 2000)
• Christina Rossetti, 'Goblin Market' [1862] any modern edition
• Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm [1883] (ed. Joseph Bristow, OUP: 2008)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus [1818] (ed. Maurice Hindle, Penguin: 2008)
• Germaine de Stael, Corinne, Or Italy [1802] (ed. Sylvia Raphael, OUP:2008)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897] (ed. Roger Luckhurst, OUP: 2011)
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792] and Maria or the Wrongs of Woman [1798] (ed. Anne K. Mellor, Longman Cultural Editions: 2006)