Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf

Harvard FAS

In this seminar, we look at the ways in which a range of writers represent the mind on the page: the mind at thought, in agitation, at rest, at prayer, in distress, in rebellion, and just doing nothing (or apparently nothing). This examination allows us to scrutinize just over a hundred years of novelistic development and experiment – from 1813 to 1927, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf – a period that might rightly be considered the high-point of the novel’s rise. We will discover that as…