Hardy and Women Who Did

Transcription

1 Hardy and Women Who Did (EAS3100) MODULE CODE EAS3100 MODULE LEVEL 3 MODULE TITLE LECTURER(S) Hardy and Women Who Did Dr Angelique Richardson (Convenor) CREDIT VALUE 30 ECTS VALUE PRE-REQUISITES CO-REQUISITES None None DURATION OF MODULE TOTAL STUDENT STUDY TIME AIMS 11 weeks hours (including 1 x 2-hr and 1 x 1-hr seminar per week) Exploring the relationship of the late Victorians to modernity, the module aims to recreate the time in which New Women, Thomas Hardy and other men such as George Gissing and George Moore, were writing - a moment of dynamic social transformation and heightened self-consciousness. Popular perceptions of Hardy continue to privilege pastoral myth, landscape and country houses above his more radical insights into class politics, marriage and the oppression of women which took him into the thick of the Woman Question debates. On both sides of the Atlantic a new uncertainty was emerging. What constituted the nature of woman? What difference did class make? What was the relationship of women to men, to education, labour and citizenship? Bestselling New Woman writers such Sarah Grand, Mona Caird (Hardy's friend), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin sought new self-definition, envisioned alternative social arrangements to the family, and debated the nature of femininity, engaging, like Hardy, and the popular and prolific Grant Allen, author of the notorious Woman Who Did (1895) with Darwinian and other scientific ideas. Working with novels, short stories, poems, letters, illustrations and other material from contemporary periodicals, including satirical cartoons, we consider issues of class, urbanization and sexual identity, fears of racial degeneration and the intersection of feminism with imperial discourses. We will also explore the emergence of new literary forms, in particular the rise of the short story, and ask how important biography and autobiography are to our reading of literary texts. The module will also explore contemporary views as to the social function of fiction. A reading pack containing contemporary material from, for example, the periodical press will be provided at the beginning of the module. INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES (ILOs) On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: 1. Module Specific Skills: a. demonstrate an informed appreciation of specific authors and texts from the late nineteenth century. b. demonstrate an informed appreciation of the literary and cultural history of the late nineteenth century.

2 c. demonstrate a capacity to make detailed connections between late-nineteenth-century literature and the social issues of the period. 2. Discipline Specific Skills: a. demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse the literature of an earlier era and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context. b. demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history. c. demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts. 3. Personal and Key Skills: a. through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups. b. through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose. c. through research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis. LEARNING/TEACHING METHODS Details of Learning and Teaching Methods: Teaching is by one two-hour seminar and a follow-up one-hour seminar per week. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion, and will be encouraged to hold independent small group meetings in preparation for the seminars. Seminars will involve a variety of learning and teaching methods, including group-work and tutor- and student-led discussion. Presentations and short responses will aim to foster group discussion, and should be seen as an opportunity to explore ideas and interests within the broad parameters of the course, and to try these out among a group of supportive and committed peers, before submission of assessed work. There will also be an opportunity for individual meetings with the convenor to enable students to discuss their progress. Students will also meet in small groups to plan seminar discussion. Seminar attendance is compulsory, and students are expected to participate in seminar discussions. ASSIGNMENTS & ASSESSMENTS Formative or % Contribution: Form of Assessment: Size of the assessment e.g. duration/length ILO's assessed by this assessment: 25% essay 1500-word 1a-c, 2a-c, 10% essay proposal 3b, c 500 words 1a-c, 2a-c, 3b,c Feedback method: Feedback sheet with opportunity for tutorial follow-up. Feedback sheet with opportunity for tutorial

3 follow-up. 65% essay 4000 words 1a-c; 2a-c, 3b, c SYLLABUS PLAN Week 1 Gender Feedback sheet with opportunity for tutorial follow-up. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1865); John Stewart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869) Week 2 New Women, New Forms Selected stories from Women Who Did and Hardy, Hardy, Wessex Tales (1888) Week 3 Darwin Hardy, The Woodlanders (1887) Selection of Poems Week 4 Hardy and Marriage Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); The Orphaned Old Maid', A Question of Marriage', An Imaginative Woman' Week 5 Women who Did and Didn't Grant Allen, The Woman who Did (1895, Broadview Press) George Egerton, Virgin Soil' (1894) Edith Wharton, The Reckoning' (1904), Kate Chopin, The Storm' (1898), Virginia Woolf, Phyllis and Rosamond' (1906) Week 6 Class Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), 'The Ruined Maid' Week 7 Working Women Grant Allen, The Type-writer Girl (1897); Hardy, We Field-women'; Constance Naden, Changed', The Lady Doctor' Evelyn Sharp, Filling the War Chest' (1910), Gertrude Colmore The Woman in the Corner' (1913), May Kendall, Woman's Future' (1887) Week 8 Deviations George Egerton, A Cross Line' (1893); Borgia Smudgiton (Owen Seaman), She-Notes' (1894), Willa Cather, Tommy the Unsentimental' (1896) Week 9 Degeneration, Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia (1895; J.M. Dent, 1995), Hardy, A Practical Woman' Week 10

4 Hardy and the City, Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters (1876), A Wife in London'; From Her in The Country'; Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening'; To a Tree in London' Week 11 The New Woman and the City Alice Meynell, A Woman in Grey' (1896); Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings' (1897); Hardy, Dream of the City Shopwoman'; Katherine Mansfield, The Tiredness of Rosabel' (190 INDICATIVE LEARNING RESOURCES Indicative basic reading list: Primary texts Please purchase the asterisked primary texts below. Any complete modern edition will do, but Penguin (or Broadview Press where specified) preferred. *Angelique Richardson, ed., Women who Did (Penguin 2005) * Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters (1876) * Hardy, The Woodlanders (1887) *Hardy, Wessex Tales (1888) *Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) *Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) Thomas and Florence Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (Wordsworth Literary Lives) (intro. Michael Irwin) (Wordsworth Literary Lives, 2007) Mona Caird, Marriage', Westminster Review (1888) * Grant Allen, The Woman who Did (1895, Broadview Press) *Grant Allen, The Type-writer Girl (1897) *Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia (1895; J.M. Dent, 1995) Ann Heilmann (ed) The Late Victorian Marriage Debate: A Collection of Key New Woman Texts 5 vols (Routledge/Thoemmes Press 1998) Ann Heilmann and Stephanie Forward (eds), Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand 4 vols (Routledge, 2000) Other texts and selected poems will be provided in a module pack at the beginning of the semester. Selected secondary texts Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 1990)

5 Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth- Century Fiction (3 rd edn, CUP 2009); Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (OUP, 1996) Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Barnes & Noble, 1982) Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson, Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies (Palgrave 2004) Shanta Dutta, Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of his Attitude to Women (Macmillan, 2000) Marjorie Garson, Hardy's Fables of Integrity: Women, Body, Text (OUP, 1991) Margaret Higonnet: ed. The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (University of Illinois Press 1993) Sally Ledger, New Woman: Fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle (MUP, 1997) Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle. A Reader in Cultural History, c (OUP, 2000) George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago, 1991) Phillip Mallett, ed., Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies (Palgrave, 2004) Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A biography Revisited (OUP, 2004) Rosemarie Morgan, The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy (2010); Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Routledge, 1988) Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (OUP, 2003; paperback 2008); Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Palgrave, 2001) Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (Macmillan, 1999) Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (Routledge, 1989); Thomas Hardy (Northcote House, 1996) Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Hogarth, 1985) Wilson, Keith, ed., Blackwell Hardy Companion (Blackwell, 2009); Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (2006) Indicative web based resources

6 Other resources: Reading for week 1 Ruskin, * Sesame and Lilies (1865); John Stuart Mill, *The Subjection of Women (1869) in On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (Penguin) DATE OF LAST REVISION 27 March 2010