123210 VO Literatures in English (2014S)

Jane Austen lived and wrote during one of the most tumultuous periods in British history. Yet readers have taken her at her word about those little pieces of ivory that she claimed were her domain. In this course we will be reading Austen's four major novels, "Mansfield Park", "Pride and Prejudice", "Emma" and "Persuasion" (in that order for those of you who want to get a bit ahead in your reading) against their historical contexts. And I do mean against, not within--a great deal of what the novels are doing is playing with what the author does not explicitly include in the books. We also will do some talking about images of women in some of the earlier eighteenth-century novels, although I will not be asking you to read these other books. My plan is to have rather a good time with the novels; discussions of Austen have become much too stuffy lately. We are going to put her back into her own time and remove some of the burdens with which too many contemporary critics have overloaded her work.