Final Self-Assessment Essay Guidelines, DUE 5/13/22
Please read over your blog responses, annotated bibs and reflections, and any in-class writing you’ve done on Teams or elsewhere. Please also review your reading journal from beginning to end, to see which texts or discussions attracted your interest or inspired further thought. Take a few moments to reflect on what you’ve done and what…
Persuasion – Details of Time
The opening lines of Persuasion reflect several precise dates: “‘Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester, by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son,…
Persuasion: social mobility, mentorship
Persuasion, Ch. 1 “But now, another occupation and solicitude of mind was beginning to be added to these. Her father was growing distressed for money. She knew, that when he now took up the Baronetage, it was to drive the heavy bills of his tradespeople, and the unwelcome hints of Mr. Shepherd, his agent, from…
Persuasion and Gender Equality
I would like to think about Mary Wollstonecraft’s influence in Persuasion—in particular how notions of gender and equality are taken up by Jane Austen in a novel filled with both silly, insipid, and rational hardy women. In particular, it might be useful to give a gloss of how social class and gender rights are…
Scenework in Persuasion
The prevailing thought I had reading all of these Austen novels, and in particular Persuasion, is that they feel much more like modern novels than anything else we’ve read so far this semester. There’s an attention to realism which was all but absent in the Amatory fiction we looked at, not merely in terms of…
Persuasion, 1818
Because everyone is pushing to get their reading done and assignments underway, we’ll have a very simple prompt for class discussion tomorrow. Choose a passage from Persuasion that lets you talk about Austen’s development as a novelist, or about the novel’s development since Haywood. Because I know everyone is pushing hard to finish the reading…
Final Assignment Guidelines, Due Thursday, May 12th
You’ll have two options for the final research project. A research paper involving at least one writer and work on our syllabus to be compared or contrasted with a second writer not on the syllabus, but which shares a common context with the first primary source. 12-15 pp., not counting sources, which should number around…
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Final Projects
We’re going to read NA and MP and continue our discussions of the final project. As you read NA or MP, think about Austen’s relation to the sentimental or didactic models of reading represented by Richardson or Burney. If there’s a “reformation” or “correction” of the heroine/coquet, how does it happen? What role does literary…
Greenfield and Troost, New Directions in Jane Austen Studies
This new Literature Compass essay has just appeared as part of their very useful series, and seems appropriate for a number of you as you think about the course readings and potential research projects. Taylin, for example, could consider the role of material culture as she thinks about the importance of dress, Serena could be…
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ENGL 8354: Jane Austen and her Reading 