English 609 Topic 51 - Nineteenth Century American Women Writers: A Case Study in American Literature
Fall 2009
Instructor: Dr. Faye Halpern
fhalpern [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
Tuesday 12:00pm - 2:30 pm
Course Description:
Dismissed by the critical establishment for many decades after their initial popularity, works by nineteenth-century American women writers were rescued in the 1970's by feminist critics. Since then, these works by women writers have become a bellwether for the different directions American literary studies have taken. We will examine a variety of these texts by women writers, including (but not limited to) an early seduction novel, The Coquette, by Hannah Webster Foster (1800); Harriet Jacobs' fugitive slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); the most popular and most reviled novel of the nineteenth-century, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52); and a novel that never suffered the contempt to which these others were subjected, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905). We will explore these works in and of themselves but also as a way to map the questions and concerns literary scholars have taken up since "the feminist turn." There are two related questions that will structure our inquiries: to what extent do we (and should we) value these texts as women's texts, and, more broadly, how have notions of literary value evolved? As well as exploring how others have taken up and transformed these texts, students in this course will be encouraged to think about the kinds of questions and issues they want to raise in their own research. They will do so in Blackboard postings, discussion-leading, and two essays, a shorter one that asks them to synthesize the critical responses to a text of their choosing and a longer research essay, which will invite them to investigate a critical question of their own.
