Jane Austen and Her World

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this course we will read of all of Austen’s novels, supplemented by helpful contemporary texts, and critical commentary on the works. We will attend to Austen’s style (her elegance, her irony, her rudeness); her aesthetic principles; her political and social engagements, (her views on slavery and Empire, the “revolution in female manners” advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft, her critique of masculinity); the function of the marriage plot; and the relationship between the novel and the theatre. Students will gain an appreciation for the complexity of the work of one of the greatest novelists in the English language. They will also consider how these works respond to the historical moment in which they were written, and how and why these works resonate across time.