Gender and Modernity

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will explore novels and short fiction (mainly British) written between 1880 and the middle of the 20th century, a period organized by dramatic shifts in cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Experimental, middlebrow, and popular novels attempted to represent the modern through depictions of new sorts of subjects: New Women, suffragettes, flappers, sapphists, typists, war workers, and more. Attention to these figures will give us an opportunity to notice how modern fiction engaged the texture of modern life through representations of free love and divorce; of reproduction, birth control, and abortion; queer sexuality; domestic and paid labor; and more.