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Semester 2

The Novel and the Modern Self, 1688--1790 (ENLI10406)

Course Website

https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/undergraduate/current/honours

Subject

English Literature

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed 4 English Literature courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses, and we do not consider civilisation & other interdisciplinary courses, freshman seminars, writing/composition courses or film/cinema/media courses; visiting students who have taken multiple courses in literature in other languages, should have passed at least two courses in English Literature as well. **Please note that this course may incur additional costs to purchase core texts** **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

This course is designed to give an overview of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century fiction. This period, in which the novel is often said to 'rise,' was also a period of radical social change. Colonial expansion, an incipiently capitalist economy, and the division of public and private spheres all drive literary examinations of what it means to be an individual. As we think about what makes the novel the novel, we will also take account of the social and historical context of early fiction. We will be exploring the relationships among literacy, genre, gender, economics, colonialism, metropolitan social realignments, and notions of the self in eighteenth-century fiction and its readership.

Course Description

The course covers narratives of passion, politics and feminine agency by Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood; fictions by Defoe and Richardson, with their lower-class heroines exercising self-determination both narrative and either economic (Moll Flanders) or moral (Pamela); the critique of this autonomous 'modern self' in Henry Fielding's third-person masterpiece Tom Jones and the self-scrutinising first-person narration of Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy; and Frances Burney's epistolary novel of feminine experience, Evelina.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on an English Literature exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one 3rd year English Literature course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the January Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed, and students will not be permitted to enrol in three 3rd year English Literature courses in the same semester at any time. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

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