ENGL 301 the Earlier Eighteenth-Century Novel Fall Term

ENGL 301 The Earlier Eighteenth-Century Novel

Fall Term 2007 MWF 1.30-2.30

Professor: Peter Sabor Office: McLennan Library M5-53B (Burney Centre: Director) e-mail [email protected]; phone 398-1675 Office hours: W 12.30-1.30 or by appointment

Teaching Assistant: Sarah Skoronski e-mail: [email protected]

Description: This course will study the development of the English novel during its first forty years. We shall begin with Daniel Defoe, one of the authors primarily responsible for the new genre in the early eighteenth century, studying his bestselling and remarkably complex novel Robinson Crusoe. We shall then turn to Defoe’s contemporary, Jonathan Swift, considering to what extent Gulliver’s Travels can be considered as a novel. We shall study Samuel Richardson’s seminal epistolary novel, Pamela (1740), and the first two of the many fictional responses that it elicited: Henry Fielding’s Shamela and Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela. Finally, we shall read two novels of the mid century: Sarah Fielding The Adventures of David Simple, with its new interest in sensibility, and John Cleland’s notorious mid-century erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill), a work written in response, in part, to earlier fiction by Defoe, Richardson, and Henry Fielding Our primary concern will be with the novelists’ depiction of class-conflict and class-consciousness: of the desire to marry up, exemplified by heroines such as Pamela and Fanny, and the equally powerful desire of higher- born characters, such as Lady Davers (in Pamela), to keep the upstarts in their place.

Evaluation: 20% participation; 30% mid-term test; 50% term paper.

Texts:

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Norton) Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Norton) Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford) Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding, Anti-Pamela and Shamela (Broadview) Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (Kentucky) John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Oxford)

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