Major English Novels: Reading Romantic Fiction

Frontpiece to 1792 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Frontpiece to 1792 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (Image courtesy Library of Congress.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

21L.471

As Taught In

Spring 2002

Level

Undergraduate

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Course Description

Course Description

Though the era of British Romanticism (ca. 1790-1830) is sometimes exclusively associated with the poetry of these years, this period was just as importantly a time of great innovation in British prose fiction. Romantic novelists pioneered or revolutionized several genres, including social/philosophical problem novels, tales of sentiment and sensibility, and the historical novel. Writing in the years of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the early industrial revolution, these writers conveyed a spirit of chaos and upheaval even in stories whose settings are seemingly farthest removed from those cataclysmic historical events. In this year's offering of "Major English Novels," we will read of plagues, wars, hysterics, monsters and more in novels by authors including William Godwin, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. In the final weeks of the semester, we will read one major novel of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, in light of these earlier texts. There will be two essay assignments, one 5-7 pages and one 8-10 pages in length, and required presentations.

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Related Content

Noel Jackson. 21L.471 Major English Novels: Reading Romantic Fiction. Spring 2002. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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